The top of the D&F Tower loomed in the distance. I planned to drop the kids off near that landmark and let them get on with their lives, which hopefully included wising up and going home and eventually entering college where all young people belong when they’re not in my taxi.
“Nice ponytail,” one of the girls in the backseat said. “Thanks,” I said.
“Are you a hippie?” the other girl said.
I gritted my teeth. This was a delicate moment. I had been wearing my hair long ever since the army let me go home, and I only began sporting a ponytail relatively recently. But I wasn’t a hippie even though I could have been mistaken for one in a police lineup.
I decided to be honest since a tip did not hang in the balance.
“No,” I said, “I’m just a Baby Boomer.”
“My dad is a Baby Boomer, too,” the other girl said.
“Does he have a ponytail?” I said.
“No … he sells life insurance.”
I love non sequiturs. I decided to push the envelope. “Does your dad listen to the Beatles?” I said.
“Who are the Beatles?” the girl said.
That was the day my world ended.
I recovered quickly. “They were a rock ’n’ roll group back in the nineteen-sixties,” I said tentatively. “Didn’t you ever hear of the Beatles?”
I glanced around at the trio. They were shaking their heads no.
“But that’s impossible!” I said loudly before I could stop myself.
And then it happened. I saw it in their eyes. The three hippies began to retreat from me psychologically. I realized what was happening. They were pegging me as a grownup. I’ll never forget the day I asked my Maw who Julius LaRosa was. She cut me out of her will.
“You can drop us off here,” the boy said in a tone of voice so polite that I knew he didn’t care for my company anymore. I hate politeness. It’s a dead giveaway.
I pulled over to the curb and parked. I felt bad. In my attempt to bridge the Generation Gap I had only widened it. Ergo, in order to try and salvage what was left of my ego or my dignity or whatever the hell I was trying to salvage, I turned in my seat and watched as the girl nearest the curb opened the rear door. Then I said with entreaty, “Have you ever heard of a music group called Wings?”
The girl stopped pushing the door open and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “You mean the band that Paul McCartney was in?”
“Yes,” I said. “The band that Paul McCartney was in.”
“Yeah,” she said, giving me the sort of smile that sales clerks give to strangers. “My mom still listens to Wings.”
“Well,” I said, “Paul McCartney was in a popular band called the Beatles before he …” I swallowed hard, “… joined Wings.”
“That’s nice,” the girl said politely. “Thanks for the ride, man.” The three of them hustled themselves out of the cab, shut the door, and got on with their lives.
I stared at the kids as they moved down the sidewalk in what I thought of as a tightly knit group. I put the cab into gear and pulled out onto the street and drove past them. I glanced in my rearview mirror. The girl to whom I had given the quarters seemed to be handing coins to the others, splitting the dough, divvying up the profits, which is to say, redistributing the wealth.
That made me feel sort of good, in the way that the end of the Civil War probably made Americans feel sort of good. But I felt empty, too. How could anybody alive today not have heard of the Beatles? This made me start thinking that all knowledge is useless, in the sense that almost everything we know has no practical application. The fact that those kids didn’t know who the Beatles were didn’t seem to have any effect on their ability to walk or talk. It made me wonder how many things a person could not know and still not die.
These were not good thoughts to have in a taxicab at five in the afternoon. I’ve always said that a taxi is a terrible place to have an epiphany—but was this an epiphany? It seemed more like the realization of the total insignificance of everything I ever believed in. Well, maybe it was an epiphany, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it because a call came over the radio for a fare waiting outside a Walgreen’s Drugstore. It was only two blocks away, so I jumped it.
It’s always risky to jump a bell for a customer who has called from a store—a grocery store, a drugstore, or a 7-11—because the call is usually made from a phone booth, and “The Phone Booth People” as I call them have a tendency to evaporate before you get there. I don’t know where they disappear to, although I suspect they hail passing cabs. It’s not the customer’s fault really. A cab comes by, they innocently wave to it, and the cabbie stops and picks them up. I’ve picked up plenty of people who have miraculously appeared out of nowhere, often standing beside phone booths, but let’s move on.
The Walgreen fare wanted to go to east Aurora, which slightly blew my mind, as the hippies used to say, because it turned into a twenty-five-dollar ride. He told me he had originally intended to take a bus but decided he didn’t want to wait around. Impatience can be as lucrative as snow when you drive a cab, although it can be detrimental when you whack out novels, but let’s not get into that.
As soon as I dropped him off I jumped a nearby bell and picked up a woman who wanted to go to Cherry Creek Shopping Center, which again blew my mind. In the space of less than an hour I had earned my profits for the day, which is fifty bucks. Forget the Beatles. Fifty bucks is the minimum amount of money I need to make my life meaningful.
Here it was only six o’clock and I could afford to head home. I was quitting work one hour early. I drove back to the Rocky Mountain Taxicab Company (RMTC) whistling a medley of tunes by Wings. I was the beneficiary of a story as old as cab driving, and God only knows how old that story is, although I suspect the first hacks were Egyptian slaves, but let’s leave pharaohs out of this. The title of the story is “The Vail Trip,” which means that a cabbie might be having a lousy day, experiencing flat tires, disappearing Phone Booth People, etc., only to end up catching a fare that nets him a hundred bucks. You just never know. That’s part of the fun of being a cab driver. People who play poker know what I’m talking about. Every time you’re dealt a new poker hand you feel a small thrill as you pick up your cards to see what fate has in store for you. Three-of-a-kind? Straight? Royal flush? Nah. A pair. But still, you can’t wait to ante up again and look at your next cards. Cab driving isn’t as nonsensical as poker, though, because at least with cab driving you go home with money in your pocket.
After I turned in my taxi, I got into my two-tone (red doors/ black body) 1964 Chevy and whistled my way back to my crow’s nest, which is what I call the place where I live. It’s the top-floor apartment of a three-story building on Capitol Hill. I parked my heap in the dirt lot behind the building and climbed the fire escape.
After I got inside I dropped my cab accoutrement on the kitchen table and breathed a sigh of relief. Thursday was over with. I was back on my normal schedule now, which consisted of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I have to drive on Tuesday and Thursday when the rent comes due. That means I work one normal-person week per month. Five days, sixty hours. However I already had shaved one hour off the week bringing it down to fifty-nine hours, which made me feel like I had just climbed out of a time machine where I had finessed reality by going back in time one hour.
But then, as I was heading into the living room to turn on the TV prior to cooking a hamburger, it occurred to me that I would have had to travel ahead one hour in order to finesse reality. I paused before turning on the TV. I frowned, which is something I’ve seen other people do and which is supposed to help you think. Even though I live somewhat of a nonconformist lifestyle, I imitate other people when it comes to thinking because imitation was how I learned to talk. It has always amazed me that infants can learn to talk without sitting in a classroom with an English teacher standing over them with a bullwhip—it kind of makes you wonder if school is a fraud. I mean, they wouldn’t even let you into school if you couldn’t talk, and yet as soon as you get into school they stick you in a class called “English.” Teaching people how to do what they already know how to do strikes me as redundant, if not a scam. It seems like the billions of tax dollars we spend on public education could be better spent teaching kids how to tip.
I never did get the TV turned on. One thought led to another, and an hour later I still hadn’t figured out whether my time machine should have traveled forward or backward in time, but by then it was moot. The hour was gone forever. I was back in the present, just in time to watch Gilligan’s Island. I shook myself out of my reverie and switched on the TV, then walked into the kitchen and started frying up a hamburger. While it was sizzling, I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the fifty dollars I had earned for the day, plus the eighty bucks that would be going to pay my cab lease and gas on Friday morning.
“TGIF,” I said aloud even though it was only Thursday. But I was alone in my apartment as far as I knew. I deliberately avoid making whimsical incorrect statements in public. You would be surprised at how many people get irritated if you say “TGIF” on the wrong day. By “people” I mean “English professors.” To most English professors it would be inconceivable to say, “Thank God it’s Friday” on a Thursday. I don’t know if that’s because they are strict adherents to the rules of language or if they are mentally ill. And I don’t want to know.
I went into the living room and pulled my copy of Finnegans Wake off the bookshelf. That’s where I hide my money in my apartment. I used to keep my money in my copy of Lolita, but the book kept getting stolen, usually during parties. I decided that the only way to keep from going broke was to stop putting my money into Lolita or else stop having friends. Both plans worked.
I got settled in front of the TV with my burger and watched Gilligan’s Island. It was the episode where a surfer accidentally travels all the way from California to the island. I have never been fond of Gilligan episodes where outsiders come to the island, partly because the outsiders always go back home, and this seems to contradict the fundamental thesis of the show, which I define as “the strandedness.” It leaves me feeling uneasy. It’s as if I am being asked to believe something that defies logic, in the way that quantum mechanics makes a shambles of Newtonian physics. Whenever a low-budget TV show causes me to ponder physics, I grow uneasy.
I much prefer it when the castaways have to deal with an island-specific plight on their own, such as an active volcano or cannibals. I don’t mind cannibals visiting the island now and then, since they come from tribes indigenous to the South Pacific—assuming of course that there really were cannibals inhabiting the islands of the earth’s southern hemisphere between the years 1963–65. I can’t imagine why Sherwood Schwartz would make up something that could be disproven by anthropological evidence. Unless he was strapped for a plot.
But here’s the thing. As I watched the big dumb blonde surfer boy wandering around the island being baffled by his plight, I started thinking about hippies. The island itself was not unlike a hippie commune. Even Gilligan had once been a bohemian named Maynard G. Krebbs.
As an aside, if you ever want to win a bar bet by an obscure trivia question, ask your friends what the Skipper’s real name is, and I don’t mean “Alan Hale,” I mean the fictional character on the show. If you don’t know his name, do some research. I would tell you myself but I don’t want to spread it around—I rake in more than fifty dollars a month posing that question, just enough to cover my bar tab. Most suckers say “Alan Hale” and that’s when I clean up.
Anyway, the castaways had—accidentally, as the opening song makes crystal clear—gone to this tropic isle and built a functioning society. This had been the goal of all hippie communes in the 1960s. I had never visited a hippie commune but I had read quite a bit about them in contemporary history books and R. Crumb comics, and it struck me that the communes of the 1960s might have succeeded if only they had included a millionaire and his wife.
The absence of free love and drugs may have contributed to the success of the Gilligan communards, although the presence of Gilligan himself arguably diminished their odds of survival. But think how boring the show would have been without Bob Denver. I’m not naive enough to think that Hollywood TV scriptwriters are fountainheads of deep philosophical profundity, but I personally think Gilligan was symbolic of something. Let’s just leave it at that. Nothing destroys the beauty of a poem faster than parsing it line by line, so you can imagine what it does to sitcoms.