It was Monday. I always feel especially decadent on Monday because of the two-day weekend break from driving. I also take Tuesday and Thursday off during the weeks when I’m not hard up for dough— meaning when I don’t have to make the rent on my crow’s nest. Having one day off twice a week “feels just right” if you know what I mean, but the two-day weekend makes me feel like Caligula. It “feels just right,” too, in its own way, but I’m always eager to get back on the road when Monday comes. I never would have believed I would look forward to working, but since taxi driving is legally defined as “work” by the State of Colorado, I guess that makes me a hypocrite.
I’ve never liked any job as much as I like cab driving. I’ve never liked any other job at all, frankly, and I’ve done a lot of jobs in a lot of cities, from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, from delivering handbills to delivering sofa beds. I washed dishes in Kansas City and mopped floors in a medical clinic in San Francisco, and I hated every single second of my life during those years. The day part I mean. Not the TV or bar part. So cab driving means a lot to me. Sometimes when I drive I feel like one of those gleeful singers or comics you see on TV who say, “I can’t believe they pay me to do this.” That makes two of us, pal.
But I’ve always suspected that if I ever won a million dollars in the lottery I wouldn’t feel any different than I do now, meaning I would still go on feeling like I didn’t have a care in the world. This is pure speculation on my part of course, since I have no idea what it actually feels like to be a millionaire. Never been there. Hope to get there. Trying hard. Buck a day. That’s the amount I spend on lottery tickets when I’m driving.
I figure what the hell, blowing three dollars a week on the chance that I might become filthy rich is a bargain—only in America, huh? And Canada. Also Asia, Mexico, and Europe, but what I’m getting at is that during the past fourteen years I’ve never given any serious thought to doing anything else besides driving a cab. I wouldn’t know what to do if for some reason the human race decided it didn’t need lackeys. Believe me, I don’t lose any sleep over that.
So I was feeling pretty good when I woke up on Monday and headed out to Rocky Cab, which is located near the I-70 viaduct north of the city. If you’ve ever driven Interstate 70 across Denver, then you’ve been in what the police refer to as “the immediate vicinity” of my place of employment. Back in 1978, a semi tractor-trailer went off the viaduct and landed in a vacant lot half a block from Rocky Cab. I don’t know why I bring that up, except it’s kind of a legend around the motor. Stew would be glad to fill you in on the details. You can still see the axles.
I walked into the on-call room at Rocky that morning and picked up the keys to 127. The cage man, Rollo, was too busy handing out trip-sheets to give me more than a perfunctory snub. Everybody was working that day, newbies and old pros. Mondays are good taxi days. Businessmen are flying into DIA, and hotels are kicking out the weekend guests. We cabbies refer to Monday as “Little Friday” since Friday is the busiest day of all for cabbies.
I went out to the parking lot and checked 127 for dents and dings but didn’t find any. I checked the oil, water, and air, then hopped in and drove out of the lot. I radioed the dispatcher that I was on the road, and I headed for a nearby 7-11 where I gassed up and bought a package of Twinkies. As I said earlier, this was how my life had been going for the past couple of months—“smooth sailing” as the creative writing teachers tell you not to say.
I headed for the Brown Palace Hotel and found only one taxi ahead of me in line, a Yellow Cab who nabbed a passenger coming out the front door as soon as I pulled up behind him. This annoyed me. As much as I like making money hand-over-fist, I like taking a half hour at dawn to eat my Twinkies in peace and read a few pages of a paperback before diving into the asphalt fray. Since I know I’m going to earn only fifty bucks for the day, I see no reason to get excited. In fact, I feel rather put upon when I drive up to a hotel and don’t have time to turn off my engine. In this way I am different from every other cab driver I know, with the exception of Big Al, who trained me to drive a taxi fourteen years ago.
Big Al possesses more or less the same attitude that I do, in that he knows you cannot win in this game, meaning you will never earn The Big Money. Just as my Big Dream involves the writing of bestsellers, his Big Dream involves winning at the dogs and the horses, although he tends to get more acceptance slips than I do. I tend to get zero. Big Al also knows exactly how much taxi money he is going to earn each day: one hundred dollars. For you non-math majors out there, that’s twice the money I earn. From a mathematical standpoint this makes perfect sense because he works twice as hard as I do, although he would submit that I work half as hard as he does.
My first score of the day came out five minutes after I parked. It was two men in suits. I had just finished swallowing my last Twinkie but was still savoring the flavor, so it put a damper on my brunch. But I swallowed a quick gulp of Coke and waited for my fares to climb in. They were not hauling luggage. This was a bad sign. It meant they were not going to DIA.
“DIA,” one of them said as they got settled in the backseat. Live and learn.
But this made me feel good. Just the fact that I didn’t have to spend forty-seven seconds putting things into the trunk, and then repeating the process at the airport, made me forget the Twinkie debacle. Forty-seven seconds is the average amount of time I spend outside my taxi per trip. I had made a scientific study of this. It took fourteen years and three wristwatches.
As I pulled away from the Brown and headed toward 17th Avenue to work my way over to I-70, I casually said, “How are you doing today?”
Note that I used the plural “you.” The English language doesn’t have a fancy plural personal pronoun for “you” like the Romance languages do—it has to be gleaned from the context, but they got it.
“We’re fine, thank you,” one of them said.
I quickly ran his tone through my mental Univac, and it spit out a card that told me to back off. Things weren’t fine at all. I recognized it. Every now and then I get a sad businessman in my taxi. After fourteen years my Univac is attuned to the nuances of business deals gone sour. I quickly turned on the Rocky radio so the cab would be filled with some noise, although I kept the dispatcher’s voice low. This was “official” noise that created a psychological wall between myself and the businessmen, which I knew they would want. They were not up to inane chatter that day. This was confirmed when I heard one of them sigh and say, “I’ll call Hudspeth when we get back to Detroit.”
The other man said nothing, but I saw the brief movement of a sad nod in my rear-view mirror. Yep. Hudspeth was not going to be happy with the news, whatever it was. I always feel bad when businessmen fail. Another “Big Carruthers Deal” had not panned out. This is a code name for failed business deals that I coined to myself twelve years back when two businessmen climbed into my taxi and one of them remarked to the other that the big Carruthers deal had not panned out. The man said it in a melancholy tone of voice. I didn’t need my Univac to interpret it. I know melancholy when I hear it. Sooner or later, in everybody’s life, the Big Carruthers Deal doesn’t pan out. It’s like the time back in Wichita when I was in college and I asked Mary Margaret Flaherty to marry me. The Big Carruthers Deal didn’t pan out.
When we arrived at the airport I did something I occasionally do to make people feel better. I offered both of them a receipt. The Rocky Cab receipt is a 2x3-inch card that tells the time and date and cost of a trip, which I sign and give to a fare at the end of the ride. The fare, usually a businessman, theoretically turns the card over to the accounting department at his company so he can be reimbursed for the cost of the trip. The cabbie is supposed to give only one receipt per trip, and the cabbie is supposed to sign and fill out the cost himself. But sometimes I remember only to sign it. I’m a pretty busy guy, so I don’t always have time to fill out the cost of the ride. I just let my fare fill in the dollar amount at his leisure, if you get my drift.
So when I held out the two signed receipts to the businessmen they brightened up a bit. Maybe the Big Carruthers Deal had fallen through for them, but the Little Murph Deal is as good as gold in any accounting department in America. They each tipped me an extra five bucks.
I deadheaded out of DIA after that. I didn’t bother to cruise past the staging area to see if by some miracle the cab line was short. It was Monday morning, meaning the line might be moving faster than normal, meaning a two-hour wait instead of a three-hour wait, but I wasn’t in the mood to sit still for two hours. I figure that a smart movie mogul could pick up a few extra bucks erecting a drive-in theater screen at the taxi stand at DIA.
I deadheaded back toward downtown, listening to the dispatcher yell at the newbies, and keeping an ear open for any bells that might come up in the vicinity of my cab. Maybe that construction worker would need another lift to the site. This is the kind of thought that cabbies have, hoping for a repeat performance of a run of good luck. I understand that gamblers at craps tables have the same futile hopes. Never been there. Never plan to go there. The truth is, I’m afraid to learn how to play craps. I figure I’m the personality type who would learn just enough to get really bad at it. Sort of like writing novels, but more expensive.
Then an address that I recognized came over the radio. It was on east 19th Avenue. I knew who it was. I didn’t jump it. I kept driving. I kept waiting to hear another cabbie snatch the call. Nobody took it. The dispatcher went on with other bells and other addresses, then came back and offered the east 19th Avenue again. I wondered what the hell was wrong with all the other Rocky drivers. Hey! Free money on Capitol Hill! What’s the matter with you idiots!
The only conceivable explanation was that they were too busy, or else snoozing at the hotels and didn’t want to be bothered with a Hill run. The truth is, only a handful of drivers work The Hill on any given day. Usually old pros, or else starry-eyed newbies who will take anything. The old pros are guys willing to make short runs all day long. The fares are small but they add up. It’s the kind of work that I call “hard.” I sort of fall somewhere between starry-eyed and old, in that I want lengthy trips in between snoozes. At any rate, nobody was jumping what I knew was a Trowbridge call.
All of a sudden I started feeling sorry for Trowbridge. He was probably waiting outside his latest awful digs looking up and down the street for his Rocky Cab. It made me think of The Little Match Girl. Also the girl in that song by Bobby Darin, “Artificial Flowers.” I’ll admit it. I like corn. I own a Glenn Miller album if you want to know the truth. Anyway, I finally snatched up the mike and took the bell. The fact is, I wanted the bell. I wanted to know if Trowbridge would hand me another Lincoln log … and at the same time I didn’t want to know. Kind of like a little kid who wants to ride a roller coaster, but at the same time he doesn’t. His friends finally resort to ridicule to make him get on the Cyclone. I was ten years old. They called me “chicken,” but let’s move on.
Trowbridge was standing outside the building with even fewer personal possessions than before, but at least he was wearing clothes. That’s more than I was wearing during Crazy Days.
I didn’t even have to open the trunk for him. But I did hop out to open the right rear door. He picked up two small boxes bulging with his stuff and mumbled “Thank you,” then climbed into the backseat. I felt bad for him as I rounded the cab and climbed in.
“Where to?’ I said, glancing in my rear-view mirror. Trowbridge raised his chin and looked at me, then looked out the front window. He didn’t answer. I started the engine, took hold of the gearshift, then glanced back to sort of encourage him to speak. That’s an old cabbie trick.
But he just kept staring out the front window. My cab was facing west, and he seemed to be gazing at the range of the Rocky Mountains in the distance. I began to grow wary. Silence in a taxi can be unnerving. It can even be a preamble to a stickup under the wrong circumstances. I finally hoisted myself around and looked him in the eye. He was holding the boxes on his lap. He was sort of clutching them.
“Where ya headed?” I said in a jovial tone of voice. Joviality is another old cabbie trick, but I hate to employ it because it makes me feel like a transparent phony.
“Buffalo Bill’s grave,” he said.
Now the silence came from me. I stared at him, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the Rockies.
“What do you mean?” I said.
He finally turned his gaze toward me. “Lookout Mountain,” he said.
“You want to go up Lookout Mountain?” I said.
He nodded. “Buffalo Bill is buried up there. They have a museum and a gift shop that I’d like to visit.”
Lookout Mountain stands at the edge of the foothills west of Denver. At the base of the mountain is a town called Golden. You have to pass through Golden to get to the top of the mountain. According to legend, Lookout Mountain was where William “Buffalo Bill” Cody sat on his horse during the nineteenth century and looked for buffalo out on the plains. But I had my doubts about that legend. Getting to the top of the mountain by car took long enough. If you went up there on a horse and happened to spot any buffalo, it would take forever to get back down. By then the buffalo would be gone. In fact the buffalo are gone.
I frowned and kept my hand away from the gearshift. It could be an hour’s drive from Capitol Hill to the top of Lookout Mountain, and I wasn’t confident that Trowbridge had the money to pay for the ride. The proper course to follow in a dicey situation like this is to ask the fare to show you the money first. This isn’t an old cabbie trick. It’s an old desperation move. You can easily get stiffed on a long ride. A cabbie has to take a number of things into consideration when a fare requests a long trip, and one of the things that you base your judgment on is the clothing the fare is wearing. If he doesn’t look like he can afford a shoeshine, you ask him to show you the money first, which can be awkward, embarrassing, and profitable.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought about those fivers he had been spreading all over town, and I suddenly wondered if he was a counterfeiter. This made me decide to take the risk. Cab driving is a risky business. Life is a risky business. But if he was a counterfeiter, he was probably loaded with rubber dough that could be laundered fast. There were plenty of car-wash change machines that took five-dollar bills. Clean and simple—no fingerprints. I would make sure of that. I had seen plenty of cop shows.