I switch from Beethoven to Sam Cooke and haul a regular to work at the Winchester plant, which makes a type of bullet. Next I haul a waiter to Applebee’s, which makes a type of food. After that, I pick up my regular Leesha from her decrepit trailer park off Route 5. While in my car Leesha is invariably talking on her cell to someone who never says a word. Leesha manages at Burger King. When I pull into the parking lot there, I wait for her to hang up and ask if some kid named Orion applied for a job last week.
“He’s about sixteen? Long face? Works at Popeyes?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember that boy. Quiet.”
“Yeah, Orion’s real quiet at first. Anyway he told me he applied. I’ve been taking him to Popeyes for months. He’s a good kid. Dedicated. On time. I like him. Just saying.”
“Okay, I’ll look over his application.”
Once she’s gone, I park the cab and step outside to stretch. The front bench seat won’t adjust in any direction and plays hell on the back spasms that ended my bartending career. After doing some stretches, I brush off the floor mats with their Crusade-cross logos and while doing this I discover an Adderall tablet crannied beside some green pill shaped like a tiny submarine. I pocket the green pill—I’ll identify it online later—then down the Adderall with a swish of Red Bull backwash and grab my paperback and slide into the Boston Strangler.
The seat directly behind the driver is called the Boston Strangler because, while sitting there, any idiot can get you around the neck with his belt and demand your kitty before dumping your body among the broken speakers of some abandoned drive-in. Imagining my own murder—you are more likely to die violently as a taxi driver than with most any other job in America—I open my book and try to read, but the Adderall has yet to kick in and I can’t concentrate enough to stop the letters from crawling around the page. It’s so quiet with the engine off that the effect is cricket-like. If I listen hard enough I can always hear crickets.
The paperback I’m not reading is called The Book of Eights and it’s about early Buddhism. I’m hoping the book might help me stop screaming at traffic. Bill Hicks called his inner demon Goat Boy, and my own version of that creature usually emerges around noon and takes over the wheel. Although I’m only on the third chapter, the book has already taught me that almost everything I thought I knew about the Buddha was wrong. As it turns out, the original Buddha, this cat Gotama, held no truck with God or gods and thought religious doctrines, gurus, ceremonies, debates, and metaphysical speculations all dangerous distractions. What we call the soul, Gotama compared to a river in constant flux, and he called all human contentions a “wilderness of opinions.”
Wilderness of opinions. Well, Gotama has my number there. Actually I am a demolition derby of revved-up opinions crashing into each other. As the Adderall sparks my brain, I start lowering myself into the forests of ancient India until the Bluetooth rings in the forest, scaring the shit out of me, and it’s Stella sending me on a rehab run.
“Oh no,” I say in a voice meant to inspire pity.
“Relax, Lou. It’s the good rehab, the one by the VD clinic.”
“Oh. Thank God. The last time I went to the sketchy rehab my fare wrote me an IOU for thirty bucks. He told me he’d had to jump out a window to escape—they were holding him prisoner—and he promised he’d pay me as soon as he got his wallet back.”
“Did you list that thirty on your log sheet?”
“Yes, I listed the thirty bucks on my damn log sheet. You got your share even though I got stiffed.”
“Well, this guy seemed normal. For somebody leaving rehab.”
I stash the paperback and drive toward the rehab on Route 5. The center is built on a tiered hillside above the parking lot. When I arrive, the stairs are lined with people, most of them wearing scrubs. There’s this stocky guy in a pointy blue birthday hat, black sweatpants, and a white thermal shirt holding a pizza box and making his way down the stairway hugging people, shaking hands, lots of goodwill here. Two men carry the guy’s luggage down the wooden stairs, and I pop the trunk and let them load up the three duct-taped suitcases. Then I check my chess app and castle to delay defeat.
My fare’s still pumping hands and getting hugs. It’s like they’re sending him off to war. When he finally reaches my cab, he places his pizza in the back and sits up front. The smell of baked pepperoni takes over the car and starts my stomach rumbling. This guy—his name turns out to be Max—has curly brown hair above a man-child’s face that would be handsome were it not pitted with thousands of tiny BB-like scars, a feast of chicken-pox wounds ecstatically scratched.
I ask him where to. Before answering, he takes off his birthday hat and studies it. It’s blue and glittery and has a green poker chip glued to the front.
“The, um, what’s it called . . . Rebel Motel? You know it?”
“I do,” I say and off we go. “Been there once today already.”
“Yeah? What’s it like? I gotta stay there till the doc gives me the all clear.”
I hesitate, then tell him, “It’ll do in a pinch. You can walk to the square at least. Hey, what’s with the pizza party?”
“Oh. Little celebration. Three months clean. Man, it’s been decades since I’ve gone that long. I’ve been addicted to smack since I was thirteen.”
“Thirteen? How old are you now?”
“Forty-fucking-two. But now—get this—they just told me I got cancer. Pancreatic cancer. The doctors aren’t sure how bad it is yet—or at least that’s what they’re telling me. I gotta stay at that motel till the doctors are done with all the tests. Plus I can’t smoke anymore.”
“Jesus, man. I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“Hey, shit happens, you know? It’s funny, though, how I was so proud of being clean and then, boom, dick-smacked by cancer.”
“I pick up a lot of people from rehabs, but I’ve never seen anyone get a pizza party before.”
“I think they felt sorry for me. I’m kinda worried they might know something I don’t. You know, about the cancer.”
I can’t think of anything to say to that. Finally I cough and mutter, “Usually, when I pick people up from rehab, they make me take them to the nearest liquor store.”
A strange look comes over his face and I realize I’ve put an idea in his head.
“Really?” he says.
“Well, not always.”
He points to the low-slung brick building catty-corner the DMV.
“You know what that is?”
“That? That’s the VD clinic, man. Trust me, I take lots of people there.”
“I had to go there last week. I had a breakout of something called HPV—I’d never even heard of that before. I kept telling the rehab nurse I ain’t had sex in years, but it turns out you can carry that shit inside your blood forever and it don’t come out till you’re sick enough or stressed to hell. A few days after I learned about the cancer, I woke up and my dick looked like a prickly pear.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. At first I thought it was the cancer got it.”
“Oh man.”
“So they sent me to that clinic and after waiting for five hours these three women spread me out on a metal table. Two of the nurses were real battleships but the third one was this young beautiful black girl—just knock-dead gorgeous—eighteen at the most—and they put on the ol’ rubber gloves and take off my drawers and cover me in a paper sheet with a hole in it they fit my dick through, then, after they wheel over this giant magnifying glass, the girl takes out this tiny medicine dropper of hydrochloric acid and starts dripping a drop onto every one of those wart things up and down my schlong.”
“Holy shit,” I repeat.
I have this condition where I can imagine things a little too vividly.
“It took over an hour for her to get them all. It was like the other two nurses were just standing there inspecting the job the black chick was doing. Like she was taking an exam on my dick. And the whole time it was happening, man, it felt like I’d been alien-abducted or something.” He makes a half gesture toward my flying-saucer air freshener. “But, hey, no complaints. The next day there was only these white bleach spots on me. Three days later I’m back to normal.”
“Damn.”
“Hey, is that Bigfoot?”
“Yeah. It’s pine-scented.”
“Huh. What flavor’s the UFO one?”
“Wintergreen. I mean, supposedly. But it was kinda a rip-off. It didn’t smell like anything. It’s decorative, I guess.”
He studies the flying saucer as if trying to conjure some memory long repressed.
“That black chick was so beautiful, man. She could have been a porn star. Every time I looked at her, I started worrying I was gonna get a hard-on. The acid burned like hell, too—pure S&M stuff—but at least I didn’t get a boner, thank God. And I felt so sorry for her having to do that bullshit. Seriously, what kind of a life is that? I’d rather be a smackhead than a VD nurse staring at dicks through a magnifying glass all day. I mean, seriously, at least being a drug addict has its perks.”
A Libra, I am still weighing those two opposite fates on my inner scales—smackhead or VD nurse?—when Max asks me about cheap restaurants near the motel.
“I’m on a budget, to say the least,” he adds.
We’re still discussing cheap food—something I know a lot about—when we pull into the courtyard of the motel and park in front of the islanded booth. The owner of the motel is never in the Plexiglas lobby. He’s always repairing something or removing bodies or wringing out blood. Cancer Max pushes the buzzer on the office door while I scan the rooms—the different colored doors—for the cranky old Vietnamese owner. No wonder he’s cranky, though. How many suicides can you mop up after before it takes its toll, right? The old guy yells at everybody. It makes him furious when you can’t understand what he’s saying. The more furious he gets, the more impossible he is to understand.
Meanwhile, remembering the meth-head twins, I glance at the red door to see if there’s blood seeping out from under it or a hockey mask hung on the knob. Instead I spot Tie-Dye smoking a Lucky on the sidewalk while staring at the sky. I follow her line of vision to a cloud that’s shaped like a tombstone. When I look back down, she’s waving at me. I wave back even though I’m behind tinted glass.
“You got friends here, huh?” Max says while getting back into the car.
“Afraid so. Hey, you might have to wait a few minutes if the owner’s cleaning a room, but he’ll show up. He’s never not here. It’s like fifty bucks a night. Just pretend you understand everything the old guy says or he’ll start yelling at you.”
I get out and begin removing his luggage from the trunk—my Town Car must have the largest trunk in the history of the American sedan. Then I pile everything at the foot of the wooden staircase that leads to the booth. I hate to leave Max standing there among his luggage, but, as far as I can tell, that’s my job, to help the needy and then abandon them as quickly as possible. He pays me with ten crumply ones, counting them out carefully from his hand into mine.
“Max,” he says afterward, and we shake.
Right at that moment I catch sight of the owner shuffling toward us holding a small mop over his shoulder like a parade rifle. This guy is always walking into a squall. Every time he closes his eyes it’s bloody beds. I avert my face as he approaches. I’m worried he’ll recognize me from the few pre-Miko drunken liaisons I’ve had at his motel.
I’m about to escape—fares are waiting, after all—when it occurs to me that Max isn’t strong enough to carry his luggage across the parking lot, so I wait for him to register and load his luggage back into my trunk and motor him the twenty yards to his room, the one with the sky-blue door, where I unload the luggage again and take it inside for him.
The room is clean enough but smells of slit wrists.
Before I leave, I tell him about EverSaved Ministries and suggest he call them up. “It’s possible they’ll help foot your motel bill. They do a lot of that type stuff.” I explain how EverSaved is paying for two women to stay in that room over there, and I point across the courtyard—Tie-Dye is gone now—and say, “If you knock on that red door, they might be able to tell you more about it.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that. Are they pretty?”
“No, they’re meth heads.”
“Ever since I been clean I started thinking about women again.”
“Yeah, well, good luck with that, but I’d be careful around those two. They’re being stalked by some guy named Jason,” I add before shaking his hand again.
On my way back to the cab, I notice a flyer has been taped to some of the doors. The flyer is advertising one of the art-hop things the local hipsters have here periodically, and it says that rooms 10 to 15 will be open to the public tonight and lists the local painters who will be displaying their works. There’s also live music in the parking lot.
I climb into my cab and while backing out I glimpse a familiar face. It’s Tony—he’s standing outside the room with the faded yellow door, and he’s about to light a cigarette when he spots my cab and quickly wheels around and goes inside.
Wait—was that Tony? I can’t be sure. Is it possible that I’ve made a mistake—the same mistake I made last night when I saw him hitchhiking on the highway? Maybe he’s dead and I’m just seeing his ghost, I think in order to console myself. Then I remember that Stella asked me about Tony yesterday, and suddenly I know it has to be him. Still, it makes no sense. Last I heard, Tony was under house arrest in Kansas City, so there is no good scenario for him being holed up in the Rebel. Oh God. Not Tony. My heart plummets and I decide to repress the situation. After all, I’ve got dispatches to answer. Usually it’s dead around lunch hour, but today I keep getting niggling calls coast-to-coast on the interstate. Meanwhile I’m starving. It’s like I can still smell that pizza. I do two campus runs, then pick up an injured guy back at the Winchester plant and take him to the Urgent Care. His hand is wrapped inside a white towel, but he seems in an okay mood about it.
“You know there’s a pizza back here?” he says as he gets out.
Sure enough, Cancer Max forgot his pizza. You might wonder then, do I take the pizza back to the motel? No, I do not. Instead of doing the decent thing, I sit there in the parking lot of the Urgent Care and wolf down a slice. Sorry dying-of-cancer guy, but that’s my rule: anything left in my cab that isn’t a cell phone or a wallet is a tip. Cell phones and wallets we have to take to the police station—at the end of our shift at the latest—everything else we keep. This is the tip you didn’t give me, cancer dude, except you did, subconsciously, man, you tipped me this pizza for unloading your luggage twice after enduring that hideous story about genital warts that will haunt me forever.
I take another bite and chew it down. It’s a cardboard-cold Pizza Hut thin-crust that tastes like grief.