Ten minutes later I picked up a fare at the Hilton Hotel and took him to an auto-rental agency six blocks away, which almost started to annoy me. It reminded me of the time I picked up a female flight attendant in an apartment building near the Tech Center down south. I figured she was going to DIA, but she told me to take her to a bus stop a half-mile from her place. She said she always took the bus to DIA, which was thirty miles north. Moments like that take the wind out of the sails of a cabbie, unless he’s a true asphalt warrior.
An asphalt warrior has to remind himself that in cab driving, as in life, all things even out. Well … that’s not true in life but it’s true in cab driving. For every lousy short trip you get, there is always a long trip waiting for you down the road. The proof of this “theorem” is a cabbie’s IRS return. If he is as professional as I am, he will earn the same amount of money every year no matter how many good or bad trips he gets. If he is more professional than I am, he will earn more money, but it will be the same more money. You can’t win in the taxi game, and you can’t lose. You will always earn the same annual income and pay the same taxes. If you are like me and have no desire to work hard, or harder, you will be satisfied with your life. For some reason the image of a man lying sideways on a wooden pallet in an opium den comes to mind. But not all cab drivers stay as satisfied as I do with the situation, and they eventually quit the taxi game and move on to more lucrative enterprises, such as selling real estate or working at 7-11 stores. The move is usually preceded by a wedding. It gets complicated.
The upshot of the deal is that I didn’t get annoyed at driving the businessman to the auto-rental agency. I simply recited the prayer of the asphalt warrior, which goes like this: “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, etc …” Then I switched on the radio so I could listen for bells.
There are variations to the prayer of the asphalt warrior, including body-language prayers, such as the quick roll of the eyeballs, or the shoulder-shrug. The prayer is just a way to let off steam before getting back to the job at hand. You have to let off steam. A taxicab is a terrible place to violate the laws of physics. A roll of the eyeballs, a quick shrug, a mumbled, “It doesn’t matter,” and you’re ready to seize the steering wheel.
It worked.
After that I jumped a bell at 11th and Broadway, which turned out to be a call from a phone booth. This took an extra-special added prayer because, as I said, people who call from phone booths frequently disappear before the cabbie arrives. Consequently, just before saying, “It doesn’t matter,” I gritted my teeth and shrugged my shoulders twice. When I arrived at the intersection, my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head because it was a female flight attendant with a suitcase who, as it turned out, was going to DIA.
We made small talk on the way to the airport. I wanted desperately to know what the hell she was doing standing with a suitcase at the corner of 11th and Broadway. If you’ve ever been to Denver, you would want to know that, too. But I decided not to ask. It was obvious that kismet was rolling out the red carpet again. Only a madman asks questions when life starts treating him like royalty. When we got to DIA, she gave me sixty dollars and told me to keep it. I vowed that I would keep it until the rent came due.
Since me and kismet were getting along so well that afternoon, I took a quick run down to the staging area to see how many cabs were waiting for trips out of the airport. I had a fantasy that, since it was Friday, the line would be moving fast and there might be only two or three cabs waiting. I missed the mark by seventy cabs.
The staging area is to kismet what kryptonite is to Superman— but then I had known that ever since DIA opened for business. It takes three to five hours to get a fare out of DIA, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a fifty-dollar trip to downtown Denver. You might get a twenty-dollar trip to downtown Aurora. Imagine waiting five hours to earn twenty dollars. Believe it or not, this has never happened to me out of DIA. When I first realized how the economic dynamics of the cab-staging area at DIA were adding up, I made the only rational decision of my entire life, which was to stay out of the staging area.
But I do make runs past the staging area to see if the line is short. It’s just a kind of fun thing—like dreaming about finding the Dutchman’s lost gold mine, or buying a scratch ticket.
I deadheaded back toward Denver. But then, just as I was coming up on the I-225 interchange, a bell came over the radio for an Aurora fare. It was another phone booth, this was located at a 7-11 at Colfax and I-225. It was tough decision—a phone booth plus a 7-11. Double threat. I gritted my teeth, gave my head a little sideways shake, inhaled deeply, and mumbled, “It doesn’t matter.” Then I jumped the bell and drove to the 7-11.
Two men were standing by the phone booth. They were wearing caps, black leather jackets, blue jeans, and boots. Both were carrying small but heavy-looking satchels. I pegged them as hit men, or else truck drivers. I was right. They were truck drivers. They wanted to go to the truck stop at I-70 and Quebec, which is near the old Stapleton International Airport site.
As we were cruising west on Interstate 70, they told me they were going to the truck stop to pick up a semi-tractor-trailer and drive it to California. My heart sank. Why wasn’t I driving to California? What could be more wonderful than driving to California in a semi-tractor-trailer? I hadn’t been out to sunny California since … well … since the time I went there to find a girl I was suspected of murdering, but let’s not get into that—it was just one of those nutty mix-ups that could happen to anyone.
The truck stop near Stapleton is located north of I-70, and is like a gas station for giants. On that day there were semi-tractor-trailers scattered all over the place, some of them were parked at pumps where they were gassing up on diesel fuel, if “gassing” up is the proper usage of English fuel language. The roofs sheltering the diesel pumps seemed miles high, and the pump islands seemed miles long. It made me feel like I was driving a Tonka Toy. I felt small and unimportant.
After I dropped off the two men I parked near the snack bar, which is actually a monstrous sort of 7-11 with a cafeteria. The place even has shower rooms fer the luvva Christ—I tell ya, truck drivers live in a parallel universe.
I used the men’s room, which was normal size as far as I could tell, then I went into the store and bought a Twinkie and a cup of joe. Too embarrassed to buy a regular-sized cup of coffee, I bought a large paper cup, which was a mistake. But I didn’t want the truck drivers lined up at the cash register to think I was a candy-ass and laugh at me. I wanted them to think I was a hardy gear-jammer who had just come into Denver after highballing across the eastern plains on the superslab and needed a monster boost of caffeine before tackling the Rockies in my nineteen-wheeler.
I say mistake because the cup was too big and thus too hot. I burned my fingers hurrying out to my taxi, then I spilled half the cup trying to get my door open. A couple of truckers laughed at me. I felt like I was in Dodge City being badgered by town loafers. I expected them to throw lug-nuts at my feet and yell “Dance, pilgrim!”
I wished my imagination would take off like that when I was sitting in front of a keyboard. I never had thoughts like that when I was alone in my apartment. Then it occurred to me that I ought to bring a portable typewriter with me whenever I drove my taxi. Considering the fact that working a taxi consists of sitting and doing virtually nothing for twelve hours a day, I might have been able to squeeze in a couple hundred words of prose fiction.
As I drove out of the land of the giants and back onto Interstate 70, it also occurred to me that if I had been bringing my typewriter with me during every taxi shift for the past fourteen years, I probably could have written a lot more failed novels.
I started calculating how many words I might have produced. Figuring a minimum of one hundred words per hour, which may have been highballing it, I could have written twelve hundred words a day, or thirty-six hundred words a week for fifty-two weeks. I had to pull off the highway and park my cab and take out a pencil and a sheet of paper to multiply thirty-six hundred by fifty-two, but who doesn’t?
The answer was 187,200 words per year. I then multiplied that by 14, which took awhile. Let’s jump ahead to the correct answer rather than wading through the less-correct answers: 2,620,800.
Two-and-a-half-million words plus!
I sat there staring at the answer for a long time. The sun moved a few degrees west before I woke up from what I later surmised was a state of shock. It subsequently took me awhile longer to get up the nerve to take the next step in this series of calculations. For those of you non-writers who might be scratching your heads with bafflement, writers spend an awful lot of time making calculations involving anything from word counts, to page counts, to the amount of money publishers will advance them on unwritten novels. As nonwriters, you probably assume arithmetic has nothing to do with producing a novel, and you’re right.
The next step was to divide the figure by 100,000, meaning a novel one-hundred thousand words long, which I use as a kind of average. The answer came to 26, meaning I could have written twenty-six novels during the past fourteen years while driving my cab. I put my pencil and sheet of paper away, started the engine, and began driving toward Denver along the back roads. I didn’t dare take the Interstate. I kept drifting in and out of a kind of trance, which was not unlike the state of shock I mentioned earlier. I don’t remember arriving at the Fairmont Hotel, but that’s where I found myself when things finally returned to “normal.”
The source of the shock of course was the full comprehension of all the time I had wasted during the past fourteen years. Prior to this, the idea of wasting time had never bothered me. Heck, I had taken pride in my ability to waste time ever since high school. Then there was the army, college, and Dyna-Plex, and each of those “epochs” of my life were opportunities to invent more creative ways to waste time. It had never once occurred to me that I could have actually accomplished something during those years.
I then wondered if the Dyna-Plex bosses had enrolled me in the time-management course for reasons that I had not been fully cognizant of at the time. I was the only person in our office who was required to take the course, although there were students from other companies in the class. It was held in another building in the Tech Center, offered by a private firm that specialized in both time-management as well as financial-planning seminars. It seemed to me that the other students were just a pack of losers, but I nodded off before I was able to give them a thorough evaluation.
Anyway, I sat there in front of the Fairmont Hotel trying to come to grips with the fact that I could have written a lot more novels than I already had if only I had taken a portable typewriter with me since Day One of my cab-driving career.
Suddenly I wanted those years back.
I felt like Gig Young in that episode of the Twilight Zone where Gig visits the hometown of his youth and realizes he has gone back in time to the 1930s, so he walks to his parents’ home and scares the hell out of his mother, and later he gets on a merry-go-round and hurts his leg and blah blah blah and so on, but anyway, to sum it up briefly, I began to feel melancholy about the swift passage of time.
I made a feeble attempt to put things into perspective. I was fourth in line at the Fairmont, it was already past four o’clock in the afternoon, and I had grossed more than one hundred dollars for the day, so I was doing all right. I figured that if I worked until seven o’clock I might make sixty-dollars profit or even more, but I had no intention of doing that. Fifty bucks, that was my goal, the only goal I ever shoot for. When you start thinking about numbers like 60 and 70, you’re just kidding yourself. I am anyway. It means I’m starting to get ambitious, and anybody with ambition has no business driving a taxi.
I started the engine and pulled away from the cabstand. I decided I didn’t want to sit outside hotels and brood about the swift passage of time. I would save that until I got home and had access to beer. There was a strong possibility that I would even light up a cigar before the night was through. When I succumb to despair, I go whole hog.
I switched on the Rocky radio as I drove and began listening to the endless litany of Friday bells. The ideal situation would be to cop a trip to DIA, which would put me way over the top financially but leave me blameless in the ambition department. I don’t actually dislike it if I make more than fifty dollars a day, as long as I can prove in a court of law that I wasn’t liable. “Luck,” “Chance,” and “Kismet” are the concepts that absolve me of blame when things start going right.
The odds of getting a DIA run off the radio were slim of course, so I didn’t give it serious thought. I decided to put in a couple hours making Capitol Hill runs before heading back to the motor. I swung my cab over to 15th Street and headed toward the gold dome of the state capitol building. It was there that I saw the hippies again.