I was staring at Trowbridge’s words when my fare came out of the bank carrying a briefcase. I quickly tucked the bills back into my shirt pocket feeling as if I had been caught reading a colorful lyric. The rear door opened and the man hopped in and said, “DIA,” which served to ameliorate the sense of emotional shock I was experiencing. But maybe that was all for the best, i.e., get back up on that horse, pilgrim.
I tried to put the sentence out of my mind. I made idle chatter with my fare as we drove out to DIA. He told me he was an accountant. That didn’t make me feel any better. But he did give me fifty bucks plus a tip at the terminal. I handed him a receipt with the cost of the ride purposely left blank. I decided I would make this my customary habit from now on, in honor of the Trowbridges of the world. But my fare pointed out the blank space to me, so I filled it in for him.
Accountants.
Give me a break.
I drove away from the airport after that. I had made one hundred dollars on two fares that day. I tried, and failed, to keep it from going to my head. I didn’t feel so bad now, but I knew how meaningless it was. On my next shift I would be lucky to earn back my lease payment. As I say, everything evens out in the world of cab driving.
I took Peña Boulevard southwest—the only direction it goes, unless you include northeast—and when I merged with I-70 my cab, Rocky Mountain Taxicab #127, made a sudden lurching motion. It slowed, then sped up again. I glanced quickly at the gas gauge, which was reading three-quarters full. I cruised for another half mile, and it lurched a second time. I touched the gearshift to make sure I was properly in drive, then I tugged at the emergency brake handle just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to release it all the way at dawn.
I was doing the speed limit, all the dials on the dashboard seemed to be in working order, the engine sounded fine, yet the cab was making these strange bucking motions. It was acting the way vehicles do when they start running out of gas, which, if you are like me, you’ve had plenty of experience with. I couldn’t figure it out, but I knew I had better get off the highway soon because something was wrong.
But then I thought, what the hell, I’m on I-70, I’ll just keep going until I get to within the vicinity of the motor, then pull off the highway and take my cab in for a checkup by the Rocky mechanics. I was only ten minutes away from headquarters. I love the interstate highway system because no matter how far away you are from anything in terms of space, in terms of time you’re right next to practically everything.
Then I noticed black smoke coming from the sides of the hood. Due to the fact that I had decided to drive to the motor rather than get off at the nearest exit, I now found myself traveling along a stretch of I-70 that did not have any exits. The Big Carruthers Deal was back, and smoke was beginning to seep into my cab through my heating vent.
I rolled my window down to create what my science teachers in high school called a “convection current.” This was supposed to direct the smoke away from the heater, across my knees, and out the window, bypassing my face. It worked! I was stupefied. This was the first time that I could recall putting to use anything I had learned in high school. Latin and Algebra, of course, were useless.
Colorado Boulevard was coming up, so I stepped on the accelerator to move things along, but the engine didn’t respond. The cab didn’t speed up. It just kept moving at 55 m.p.h. So I began rhythmically tapping on the accelerator, expecting 127 to both speed up and slow down, but there was no detectable response. There seemed to be no connection at all between the gas pedal and the engine. The good news was that 127 didn’t seem to be slowing down either. It was as if my cab was being pulled along by a UFO tractor-beam.
Colorado Boulevard came up, but because 127 seemed to be doing well I decided I would let the tractor-beam pull me past it and on to the exit at Vasquez Boulevard, a little farther along. To this day I don’t understand why I did that. Instead of taking the Colorado exit, I made the same bad decision that I had made a few miles back, which was to stay on the highway. Why did I do that? In the midst of disaster I kept making plans. Was I in denial? Was I trying to salvage the Big Carruthers Deal? All I knew was that the “Exit Next Right” sign at Colorado whizzed past me in a blur, and I found myself still traveling along the highway with a useless gas pedal under my right foot and a smokescreen blowing across my knees.
My speed remained a constant 55. The Vasquez exit was coming up, so I tapped the brakes in preparation for getting off the highway, and guess what—I had no brakes.
Fortunately the highway there is sort of hilly. After Colorado you drop down a dip and rise again to the Vasquez exit, so I shifted into neutral and kept my foot away from the accelerator and felt 127 beginning to slow as I went up the rise toward the exit. I don’t know what gravity is, and I’ll bet Albert Einstein didn’t either, but it worked that day.
By the time I swung onto the exit, I was going 25 m.p.h. The only problem was that I still didn’t have any brakes. The exit ramp drops a good thirty feet from the highway down to Vasquez Boulevard at a steep angle. No problem though. I would just ease 127 over to the left side and let the tires rub against the curb. I had done this on slippery roads in the wintertime, so I was somewhat of an expert on desperation moves.
I took a fresh grip on the steering wheel and turned it to the left, and guess what—I had no steering.
Up until that moment the whole process of losing complete control over my vehicle had the quality of a metaphor. It mirrored my life, and I have never pretended to have any control over my life. As a consequence, I hadn’t felt any particular panic until I found myself rolling down the exit ramp toward a highway filled with semi tractor-trailers. Vasquez Boulevard is an access road for truckers headed to the warehouse districts of north Denver, and there were plenty of trucks on the boulevard that day, baby.
At the bottom of the exit ramp was a stop sign, and I was headed right for it, and through it if I didn’t do something fast. At this point I believe my Univac took control of my body, because suddenly I grabbed the steering wheel like a tackling dummy, threw my entire body weight against it, and 127 lurched to the left. The tires hit the curb and began slowing my vehicle. I came to a halt ten feet away from the stop sign.
Now that I was stopped, the smoke was no longer blowing across my knees. It was filling my cab. The engine was on fire. I grabbed my plastic briefcase, unbuckled my seatbelt, shoved the door open, and dove out. I landed on a strip of hard earth and rolled between the curb and a chain-link fence. It was just like in the movies, but it was real, and it hurt.
I got up and ran to the chain-link fence and turned and saw flames dripping from beneath the engine, probably caused by melting rubber and plastic parts. It created a little garden of fire beneath my engine. It was sort of pretty.
I leaned against the fence rubbing a bruised elbow and watching as the hood began to turn black. I knew then that 127 was a goner.
Pretty soon a cop car materialized and pulled into the exit ramp going the wrong way. It parked facing 127. The cop got out and asked if I was all right. I said yes. Then he drove slowly to the top of the ramp with his red light flashing to block traffic coming off I-70. Next came a fire truck with its siren wailing. Now that everything was a total loss, the government was showing up to take charge.
I watched with fascination as the paint job on 127 turned black, the fire progressing from front to back as if the taxi was in a car wash that spouted flames rather than water. First the paint job on the hood bubbled and turned black, then the roof, then the trunk. I saw the steering wheel become a ring of fire, then droop. By this time the firefighters had climbed off their truck in their yellow rubber spacesuits and started milling around. There were no fireplugs nearby, but I expected them to dash to the taxi with extinguishers and put out the flames. But no. They just wandered around letting my cab burn.
Then the right front tire exploded. A minute later the left front tire exploded. They sounded almost like hand grenades. I had once served in the army, and for some reason that I’ll never understand, I was allowed to detonate a hand grenade, so I knew what they sounded like. The tire explosions weren’t quite as impressive, but they still gave me a shock. I waited expectantly for the rear tires to explode, and I wasn’t disappointed. Bang! Bang!
The firefighters began circling the hulk of 127 snuffing out rubber and plastic fires on the exit ramp. Apparently they had decided to just let it burn itself out. I didn’t know why they weren’t worried about the gas tank exploding. I wasn’t worried either because I didn’t think about it. This would explain why I drew close to the cab to peek into the interior to see the seats embroiled in an inferno of roiling flames. It was kind of cool. The whole scene was cool, until I realized I was out of a job.
I guess I was in shock. The sight of my taxi burning was sending an adrenaline stream though my nervous system that I simply was not used to. I felt giddy and gleeful. It reminded me of my first scotch. As the flames died down and the smoke dissipated and I saw the black hollow hulk of 127 resting tireless on the road, I began to come down from my natural high. The adrenaline rush was fading. I began to wonder how I was going to pay for having destroyed my taxi, because somehow, in some way, Rocky Cab would find out that I had not taken proper safety precautions, had not gotten off the highway before it caught fire, that I had pushed the envelope to the point of no return, that I had driven my taxi to death—although I didn’t actually know how they would find this out because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them.
I didn’t have any idea how much taxicabs cost. I had never asked. And right then I didn’t want to know. I began to grow afraid. I wanted my adrenaline back. I wanted to spend the rest of my life giddy. But it was no-go. The cop began walking toward me. It was just like in the movies. He was walking in slow motion. I was trapped. Caged. Nowhere to run.
“I called your company to let them know what happened,” he said.
You fool! I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I just said, “Thank you.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he said.
It came to me fast. I should start coughing. I should buckle and fall to the ground, feign unconsciousness, put in a medical claim, sue the cab company, get a million dollars, and give 90 percent to a lawyer.
But who was I kidding? The lawyer for the insurance company would probably put me on a witness stand and tear me to ribbons. Fraud! Perjury! The Rock!
“I’m okay,” I said.
The cop walked away in slow motion again. Maybe he was just tired. The firefighters managed to pop the hood on 127, and after the smoke cleared they looked over the blackened ruins of the engine and wrote something down on a clipboard, but I was too leery to go see what they were writing. Then a firefighter strolled up to me and asked if I knew the taxi’s PUC serial number, which was a long series of digits that had been stenciled on the left rear fender. I told him I didn’t know it. I had been driving 127 for fourteen years and had never learned its PUC number—sort of like people who live in New York City and never visit the Statue of Liberty.
He shrugged and walked away. He didn’t even ask for my name. I couldn’t judge whether this was a good sign or a bad sign, or simply the sign of an inconsequential triviality. I abandoned a plan of trying to pass myself off as nothing more than an innocent bystander. That had been known to work in less pyrotechnic circumstances.
A tow truck arrived. The firefighters packed up and left. The cop drove off. Pretty soon it was just me and the tow driver. He went into his act. The black husk of 127 was dragged by chain onto the flatbed of his truck.
“Hop in,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride back to the cab company.”
Rocky Cab was less than a mile away, and by then I was glad I hadn’t driven all the way there only to let my supervisor, Hogan, and the cage man, Rollo, especially Rollo, watch my cab burn up. It would have been embarrassing and humiliating, the two words that best describe my life.
I climbed in and rode back to the motor staring out the front window and wondering what I was going to do for living now. I felt weak and fragile. It must have been an adrenaline hangover. I wasn’t that familiar with adrenaline, since I never did anything that required it. I don’t think I had walked faster than two miles an hour since I got out of the army.
Even though Rocky Cab was less than a mile away, it seemed to take forever to get there. The closer we got, the slower we seemed to go. This gave me time to parse my blunder. I thought about the fact that I had been cruising along Interstate 70 at a rate of 55 miles per hour with no brakes for perhaps seven miles. I had been traveling in a straight line most of the way. And it was only when I tried to make a hard left toward the curb that I discovered that the power steering was out. You may have experienced this yourself. Power steering has spoiled us Americans. I don’t know how the pioneers made it to California without it.
Then I thought about what would have happened if there had been a traffic jam on I-70 and I had been forced to brake or pull some fast evasive action. I might have collided with the rear of another car. I had been sailing along oblivious to the danger I was in. I began to feel ill. I thought about asking the tow truck driver to pull over so I could open the door and vomit. But then I thought, What if I can’t vomit? Think how embarrassing that would be. I would have to pretend to vomit, the ultimate humiliation. He would probably catch on.
By the time we got to Rocky Cab I was a mental wreck. The driver told me that he would take my cab to a junkyard to be turned into scrap, which was redundant, but I didn’t say anything. My ego was too wounded to encourage him to speak more precisely. He let me out, then drove away. I stood in the silence of the street watching the black husk of poor ol’ #127 disappearing down the road.
I took a deep breath and sighed. It was time to go into the main office and face the music, although I didn’t actually know what “face the music” meant on a literal level. You would think that facing music would not be a bad thing, especially if it was Beatle music. Yet somehow the phrase “face the music” possessed a negative connotation that seemed appropriate. It was time to face the music. But there was one problem. I wasn’t psychologically prepared to face the music.