I drove down the mountain and skirted the edge of the University of Colorado. It reminded me of Kansas Agricultural University, insofar as it was a campus. As I drove out of Boulder and up the big hill that would take me back to Denver, I started thinking that I shouldn’t have dropped out of KAU. I thought I should have stayed in Wichita in spite of the fact that Mary Margaret Flaherty had refused to marry me. If I had stayed in Wichita, my Maw would have let me live in my bedroom practically rent-free for the past twenty years. This would have had the effect of preventing me from getting a job in Denver as a cab driver and subsequently “helping” people, many of whom never would have needed my help if they hadn’t climbed into my taxi in the first place.
I headed toward the glow of Denver. At night Denver glows, whereas in the daylight it smolders. You can always tell where Denver is. When newcomers arrive in Denver I inform them that it is impossible to get lost in the city because they can always see the mountains, assuming they understand that the mountains are to the west. If they don’t understand that, then I have hit what is known as “The Wall” in the world of free advice.
I was halfway to the city limits when I noticed that my hands were still shaking. But that’s how it always is for me. I remain cool and calm in the midst of disaster, and when the disaster is over I start thinking too much.
Which is to say, I could have gotten killed up there on that mountain, although it wasn’t the mob of hippies that worried me, it was Chakra’s henchmen. Guys like Chakra know how to keep their hands from getting dirty. Surround themselves with Ottos. Make threats. Incorporate fear. Even gentle flower children can be motivated to certain types of violence if they’re threatened with the abstraction of fear—the next thing you know they’re running down the streets of Chicago throwing tulips at cops.
I tried not to think about it. I had been humiliated. Stripped of my mask. Exposed as a fraud. The fact that I always knew I was a fraud helped me to deal with the situation. I mean it wasn’t like I had “learned” something awful about myself that night. Fraud has always been an ace-in-the-hole. I just don’t like other people to know it.
Then something occurred to me. Maybe I had been using fraud as a crutch. Maybe I had been relying too much on chicanery to get me through this poker tourney we call life. And maybe—just maybe—life had called my bluff. This is why I never bluff when I play poker. When someone calls your bluff, you are exposed not only as a fraud but an incompetent fraud. Believe me, there are plenty of strangers in Vegas who remember my name.
As I drove along the highway, I began to think I ought to try being real for once. I’ve always said that a taxicab is a terrible place to have an epiphany, but any motorized vehicle will do. I started to wonder what would happen if I removed fraudulence from the loop, the matrix, the paradigm of my existence. What would I be left with? I thought about that as I swung down onto Interstate 25 and headed south toward the lights of Denver. The pickings were slim but I realized that, if nothing else, I could say one thing about the real me with absolute certitude: I was an asphalt warrior.
I took the exit at Interstate 70 and headed east. A few minutes later I took an exit down an off-ramp. From there I aimed the van along a road that I had once traveled while seated shotgun in a tow-truck after a taxi I had been driving was destroyed in a holocaust of flames and exploding tires. It’s a long story, and sort of funny.
Pretty soon I came to an intersection. I turned left and cruised past the main building of the Rocky Mountain Taxicab Company. I pulled into the dirt lot and guided the van down a row of parked cabs that—in the moonlight—looked new. All the vehicles looked like they had just come from the parking lot of the Denver Police Department where they had served as mobile tools in the arsenal of law enforcement. Moonlight became them, it’s true, but in the stark light of day they looked like what they really were—however I won’t destroy the illusion by lifting the flounce.
I drove along looking at the numbers stenciled to the fenders. I was looking for one cab in particular. If it wasn’t there, that was okay, but I much preferred it over the others that were available. I was used to its saddle. It was broken in. I wished I had been able to look for RMT #127. Now there was a taxi with a broken saddle. But that was long ago, and in another junkyard.
Then I saw it: #123. It had not been signed out for the night. Or else it had been signed out and then brought back by a newbie who had made the mistake of trying to ride herd on the mean streets of Denver on a weekend. But you don’t just walk into a rodeo with five days of driving under your seatbelt and hop onto the saddle of “Ol’ Thundercrack,” as we cabbies refer to Saturday night.
No, you have to work your way to the top of that nightmare. You have to pull a few graveyard shifts in the middle of the week, you have to sit staring dumbly while a drunk with the legs of an Olympic athlete disappears in the panoramic landscape of your rear-view mirror. You didn’t think he had it in him, did you? He could barely stagger when he came out of the Lulu Room, and there he goes with your six-dollars and forty cents.
You have to learn, baby, learn—as the hippies almost used to say. I pulled into a parking slot and climbed out.
I walked into the on-call room, where Stew was reading a copy of Model Railroading Magazine. I tell ya—Stew could set up a life-size poster of himself reading that magazine and grab a few winks in the back room and the management wouldn’t know the difference.
I walked up to the cage and rapped my knuckles on the countertop.
“Murph!” Stew said, setting the magazine aside. “What are you doing here at this time of night?”
“Aagh,” I said, which is a code word that needs no translation among asphalt warriors. “I had a bad week, can’t sleep, nothing good on TV, and my woman left me. So I thought I would come in and pull a short shift. Is one-twenty-three available?”
“Sure is,” he said going into action, reaching for the key and a trip-sheet.
I had taken a chance. Up to now I had been pretending to be suspended from driving. If that was going to happen for real, it would happen on Monday, but I was afraid that if I showed up for work before Monday the man in the cage might already have been ordered by Hogan to pretend that I wasn’t even there. If that happened, I was prepared to argue that the police had learned the whereabouts of the girls, which logically would have rendered my pretense moot and thus allowed me to not work for real, unless I felt like working, which was so unlikely that Hogan hopefully hadn’t even thought of officially forbidding me to do what I never do anyway. That’s what I was counting on. When specious reasoning collides with convoluted logic, I always come up smelling like a rose.
I paid thirty-five dollars for a short-shift, picked up my key and trip-sheet, and said, “Thanks.”
There was nobody else in the on-call room, so Stew would have to wait until another cabbie arrived before he could express his wonder at the thing he had seen on this Saturday night: Murph was walking with the zombies.
I exited the room.
I crossed the lot to Wally’s van, locked it up, and climbed into 123.
It took fifteen minutes to get home. I climbed the fire escape, went inside, took off my muslin shirt, and grabbed a fresh T-shirt out of my closet. The other T-shirts rustled on their hangars. I grabbed a fresh pair of jeans from a hanger. The other jeans rustled, too, as if all my clothes knew what I was doing, where I was going, and wanted badly to join me on my mission in the night. It was as if my clothes knew I was “up to something.”
I removed my deep forest green Rocky jacket from its hanger, then removed my equally green Rocky cap from its hook on the closet door. I carried them into the bathroom and set them on the sink. I looked at my hair in the mirror. I reached back and yanked the bandanna away. It was like pulling the pin on a hand-grenade— the hair became a giant fuzzy ball. The same thing happened to London Lee’s hair on the Merv Griffin Show.
I grabbed a rubber band off the bathroom doorknob where I store them—the ambient moisture keeps the rubber springy. I banded a new ponytail, adjusted my T-shirt, tugged at the waistband of my jeans, and reached for my Rocky jacket. I slipped it on and zipped up, then grabbed my cap and placed it squarely on my head.
I stood back and inspected myself in the mirror.
I was “going in.”