We were on Broadway getting close to midtown, so I finally glanced back and asked the big question: “What address are you going to?”
He surprised me by saying, “Anywhere along here will do.”
I checked the landscape quickly, and did not see any apartment buildings. That area of north Broadway is a kind of ancient business district with a few gas stations and two-story, red brick office buildings and garages and cafés, but I didn’t see any private digs. I glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw him tucking a billfold into his breast pocket. This was reassuring in its way. It indicated he had money. Whenever I ride in the backseat of a cab, which I occasionally do, I always make a big deal out of pulling my billfold from my back pocket and blatantly counting out my dough, because I know I look like someone who doesn’t have any money.
There wasn’t much traffic on the street, so I had no excuse to keep moving, but I was a bit concerned about the fact that he did not give me a specific address. I had figured we would be going to another tenement like the last two places that I had hauled him to. But as I had reminded myself scores of times during the past fourteen years—to no avail—it was none of my business. The ride was over. We had met briefly and now we were parting. Ships passing in the night. Hail and farewell. The lonesome life of a cabbie.
After I pulled over to the curb and parked, I quickly reached into my briefcase and scrounged a receipt, then turned and looked at Trowbridge, who was holding a number of bills toward me. The fare had come to $45.00.
“I need to give you a receipt,” I said.
“That won’t be necessary,” he replied.
“What I mean to say is, I am required by PUC regulations to give you a receipt,” I lied. “Any fare that comes to more than twenty dollars must be accompanied by a receipt for the taxi company’s files.” I was manufacturing this baloney at a hundred miles an hour, but I knew instinctively that I would get away with it because civilians don’t know anything about cab driving. Not only was I not required to give him a receipt, I could have given him the ride free for all the city government cared. The only thing that interests them is my annual license renewal fee, the bastards.
“All right … whatever,” Trowbridge said in a voice as disinterested as I knew it would be.
I plucked a fresh pen from my briefcase and bent down and carefully printed the following words on the Rocky Cab receipt: “You must not hold a job that you like.”
I signed it, but I didn’t jot down the cost of the fare.
I sat up straight and twisted around and took the money from him and gave him the receipt. He tucked it into his coat pocket without looking at it. So much for starting that conversation.
“That was a very pleasant trip,” he said, as he shuffled his boxes together in a preamble to climbing out. “Thank you for putting up with my verbal effusion of rambling memories.”
“You’re welcome.”
With that, Trowbridge climbed out of the taxi and shut the door. Hail and farewell. It was time to turn on the Rocky radio and get back into the game. The ride had taken almost an hour and a half, and had proven to be profitable. I figured that if I got a trip like that every hour and a half I could make lots of money per hour, but we’ve had that conversation.
I switched on the radio and began listening to the dispatcher yelling at the newbies. I pulled away from the curb and drove toward 18th Street. I turned right on 18th thinking about making my way to the Fairmont Hotel to see how long the line at the cabstand was, but instead I made another right and headed back toward Broadway.
I’m not very good at almost everything, but I’m especially not good at keeping vows. So instead of going to a hotel, I cruised up the street and stopped at the intersection and looked both ways along Broadway. Trowbridge was a block and a half away, and moving at a slow pace—a trudge. I sat at the corner awhile watching him until a car pulled up behind me and honked, then I pulled around the corner and proceeded to “tail” Trowbridge. I had done a bit of “tailing” in my time and had discovered that there’s not much to it, thank goodness.
I pulled over and parked and watched him for a bit, and when he got far enough away I pulled back out and drove down the block, keeping my eye on his forlorn figure. Then I saw where he was going. It was a long, red brick building that covered half a block—the men’s mission. It was a place where homeless men could go for a hot meal and a bed for the night.
I sat and watched as Trowbridge entered the front door with his two boxes, then I sat for a little while longer staring at a crowd of men hanging around the building: shabbily dressed, unshaven, unemployed men who had hit the rock-hard bottom of old Denver. I reached up to my shirt pocket and felt the money Trowbridge had given me. Why would he spend so much dough on a pointless cab trip? He could have used it to get himself a hotel room somewhere else. But then maybe it was his last dough and he wanted to spend it on something that was worthwhile to him because it wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway.
Jaysus.
I thought about going into the mission and giving the money back to him, but I knew he wouldn’t accept it. When you’ve driven a cab as long as I have, you get to the point where you can read people, and his book read pride. I didn’t know who he was or what his story was, but I knew he wouldn’t have taken the money back. He hadn’t wanted me to know where he was going, and it might have upset him to learn that I had followed him.
I thought about going into the mission and just dropping the dough into the donation box, assuming they had one, but then I thought, Give it up, Murph. You earned the dough fair and square, and Trowbridge would want you to keep it. Capitalism is capitalism. Leave the world-saving to the people who can afford guilt. You can barely afford Twinkies.
But that wasn’t it. The real reason I didn’t go to the mission and hand the money over was because I wanted to know if he had written a note on another fiver. In the end, uncontrollable curiosity kept me from doing the right thing. I believe Oppenheimer used the same excuse when he agreed to build the atom bomb.
But I felt so bad about all this that I didn’t reach into my shirt pocket and pull out the dough and examine it. I felt like a voyeur, which is fairly normal, but for the first time in my life it held a taint of obscenity, which had never bothered me, but let’s not get into that.
I felt melancholy as I drove away. During my drifter years I had floated around on the fringes among the down-and-out, but I had been young and was always able to find a job to afford a room. The handbills of Cleveland come to mind. I never really hit the skids. But even if I had hit the skids, I wouldn’t have thought of it as “the skids.” I would have thought of it as “romantic,” like Jack Kerouac thumbing his way around the country and living in bowery rooms, when in fact he always had his mother to wire him money after he blew his stash on wine.
Writers.
Give me a break.
I drove to the Brown Palace and pulled in line behind four other cabs and settled in to read my paperback. But I couldn’t concentrate. I still felt guilty. Not about the money but about the note I had written to Trowbridge on the spur of the moment. I would never have written that note if I’d known he was going to the men’s mission. I had figured he was just moving to a new apartment somewhere along Broadway, and I wanted to get his reaction to my note. I was pretending to be a scientist, but I was just a jerk. A nosy jerk to boot. In other words, a social scientist.
After the cabs ahead of me pulled away with their fares and I was first in line, I forgot about Trowbridge and began reciting the universal cabbie mantra, “DIA, DIA”—universal in Denver anyway. I would imagine the cabbies out in Los Angeles mumble, “LAX, LAX,” whenever they sit in front of the Beverly Hilton, assuming the Beverly Hilton has a taxi-stand. Never been there.
I got a Cherry Creek instead. It was a rich woman who wanted to go shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. After she told me her destination, I drove in silence down Broadway, to Speer, to First Avenue. I didn’t make chummy cab chatter. Rich women make me nervous. I’ve seen Midnight Cowboy five times.
After I dropped her off, I looked at the lousy seven dollars she had given me, then I placed the money in my plastic briefcase. I wanted to keep it separate from the Trowbridge dough. The Trowbridge dough was hanging heavy on my chest. I wanted to pull it out and shuffle through the bills, but at the same time I didn’t want to. I felt like a kid who had figured out where his parents had hidden the Christmas presents and knew that he had it in his power to ruin his own surprise on Christmas morning, but couldn’t bring himself to sneak a peek because it would be like saying goodbye forever to his childhood. That would be an unusually perceptive child, but that’s how I felt. Okay. I’ll admit it. I was eleven years old when I surreptitiously climbed into our attic in Wichita on Christmas Eve and said goodbye forever to my childhood. I just didn’t know it at the time.
I pulled away from the front door of the mall and halted for the stoplight at the exit from the shopping center. The Rocky radio was on and I was only half listening to the dispatcher when the words “Cherry Creek” resounded in my ears. I snatched the mike from the dash and said “One twenty-seven” before any other driver could grab it. This was the ideal situation. I was at the mall, and there was a fare at the mall. Lady Luck was with me. The address turned out to be a bank across the street. The dispatcher put the cap on my day by saying, “DIA.”
I hung up the mike thinking about all the other cabbies grousing at my luck. A lot of cabbies lurk at the mall waiting for a big score, but a normal mall trip consists of a rich lady going home with her shopping bags, and that can get old. The Cherry Creek Shopping Center is not that far from the places where the rich folks reside, as I call ’em. A lot of old pros regularly work the mall because, I assume, they like being around rich folks. But each to his own, I always say.
I drove across the street and parked in a no parking zone where my fare would be able to see me when he came out the door of the bank. I wasn’t worried about cops. Cops will give a cabbie a lot of slack as long as he remains inside his vehicle and doesn’t stay too long in a zone. Sanctioned lawbreaking always makes me feel “special.” I once made up a song called “Parking In A No-Parking Zone.” I often make up songs as I drive my taxi, and sing them aloud to myself. Most of the songs have “colorful” lyrics, so I won’t belabor the point, but I will say that cab driving, like living alone in a Yukon cabin, can lead to colorful thoughts.
While I was waiting for the fare to come out of the bank, I finally surrendered to my curiosity, as I knew I would. It was time to say goodbye forever to my childhood again.
I leafed through the money that Trowbridge had given me and found a fiver among the tens. I saw the following string of hand-printed words that went around the border of the bill like a neat row of tiny Christmas presents: “You must be compelled by an inner force to read books, listen to music, and view films which serve only to send you spiraling deeper into the bottomless pit of frustration.”