A Crab Die

2008-08-06T02:13:00.000-07:00

I haven't checked on this for a while, but I'm still around, and am almost done with the column. I enjoyed writing it, but am feeling a little done with being a cab driver, or at least like I'll be cutting back on it significantly. And my computer sucks. So anyway, yeah, I'm (voluntarily) giving it up. But I fixed the link on the right, which will take you to the archive. When I'm done, maybe I'll start this back up, as plenty of things have happened which didn't really fit the WWeek formant.

2007-05-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've just been WAY too busy with work and trying to find a place to live and woman stress and buying a car and everything else. A new column went up on Wednesday, I probably won't be back to blogging in any significant way until after I'm settled (early June? hopefully? please?).

Back in town

2007-05-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

Memphis was awesome, the internet situation was not. I'm too tired to upload photos, but there'll be a bunch in the coming days.

There's a new column up here. No, he did not get me for $93.

I'm in Memphis

2007-05-11T00:31:00.000-07:00

My sister's graduating from college. I'm very proud of her, and my computer's being very cranky. It's good to be back in the South, it's so different from Portland. I'm glad to be here, but I'm also glad that I don't live here.

I'll try and post more pictures tomorrow, when the computer's hopefully less cranky.

Ho Ho Ho

2007-05-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

Another retread column's up here, likely the last for a while. Starting next week, most columns will be ones you haven't read before, though I may still slip in the occasional "greatest hits" piece every once and a while. The archive remains here.

I'm going to Tennesse in a couple of hours.

R

2007-05-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

Whale Blubber

2007-05-05T01:37:00.000-07:00

The Church of Swinetology

2007-05-04T05:10:00.000-07:00

libations, hand-washing, and a schema for personality change

2007-05-03T05:05:00.000-07:00

Another story you'll recognize

2007-05-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Column's up here.

End of the Shift

2007-05-02T03:54:00.000-07:00

Western foot of the Broadway Bridge (NW 10th & Lovejoy).

A friend's house

2007-05-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

Just Married

2007-04-30T02:53:00.000-07:00

Yay for post 100!

(and C & R's marriage)

NE 42nd @ Alberta

2007-04-28T03:51:00.000-07:00

Boo flash & dirty windshield.

I played a show tonight, and then I went to see an awesome one by Bigg Jus and Myka 9 (ohmygod). Then I worked for a couple of hours.

I feel completely beat, and wish that I had someone's rump to spank. Other than that, life is beautiful.

Happy Birthday to Me

2007-04-27T03:18:00.000-07:00

(I did not take this picture)

I had a very happy birthday - dinner at Ya Hala, and then I got to see the amazing Konono No 1.

I don't want else to say except that I love my life. I know Wil wants music reviews, but I'm not sure how to describe Konono No 1.

"Awesome" is a good word.

"Fantastic" also works.

I have not enjoyed a show that much since I saw Afrirampo for the first time, and I can't reccomend their music enough. It was a real treat to be able to see them live, I just had a huge ear-to-ear smile on my face through the whole show. If you buy the album, you will love it, and all of your friends will think you are awesome when you introduce them to it, and be jealous of your taste in music. This is true for anyone of any age, no matter what kind of music you normally listen to.

Ya Hala's the best Lebanese food in town. I am a cab driver, and I know these things. Eat there.

This is not my arm

2007-04-26T06:07:00.000-07:00

Today is also my birthday.

2007-04-25T07:04:00.001-07:00

New column up here.

The short ride home

2007-04-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

David Halberstam is dead

2007-04-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

David Halberstam is dead, and that makes me sad.

I'm not going to bother trying to eulogize someone I never met, but he was, in my opinion, the greatest living American writer. And now, I guess, he's not. When I think of people with just pure story-telling chops (whose stuff I've read), regardless of their nationality or whether they're alive, he's near the very top of my list. Gabriel Garcia Marquez beats him out. Maybe James Jones. Maybe Alan Moore. Maybe Carl Hiaasen (again, purely in terms of ability to almost physically seize you with the strength of a narrative). Tom Wolfe isn't quite there, though he'd like to think he is.

And that's pretty much it. This isn't to discount other writers, it's to say that he was just that good.

While I was not a huge fan of his nostalgic sports books of recent years (meaning I didn't read them, I probably would've devoured them had I started them), the man wrote some of the most personally influential books I've ever read. I can't think of a book of his that I read and didn't like. I also can't think of one that I was easily able to put down. I mean Jesus, the guy wrote a book about the corporate politics of the automobile industry that had me riveted.

The Best & The Brightest and The Children should both be required reading for every American. I loved The Powers That Be and Breaks of the Game (required reading for every Portlander). These are all (save Breaks) gargantuan, and are all non-fiction. The amount of talent and intellect involved in writing a 900 page book that's actually interesting throughout is astounding. There are people who can write good sentences and people who can write good paragraphs, but he just wrote good books. And he just kept writing them, and writing them, and they never stopped being incredible.

And thinking about it, the main thing that strikes me is his enormous empathy. The amazing thing about his books, and this is likely a product of the enormous amount of interviews he did, is that there's never a villain, as such. The Best & The Brightest is an absolutely heart-rending story about how the U.S. got so entangled in Vietnam, and many of his books are about great tragedies (whether noticed as such or not) of American life, but throughout them we're always able to understand that the men and women making decisions that lead to such disastrous consequences are normal people, often good people, and perhaps even abnormally talented and good people, with moral codes and true desires to do the right thing.

I feel incredibly ineloquent (is that even a word), and I could just keep rambling and rambling, so I'll just leave it at this:

I am a better person for having read David Halberstam's books.

And that's how we get back to the new "things that make me happy" theme of the website.

Kitty Midwife

2007-04-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

Kitty Midwife at PDX Artix '06 (with adoring fan).

2007-04-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

2007-04-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

2007-04-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Instead of explaining this one, I think I'd rather let you guess.

This should be made clear...

2007-04-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

On the column archive on the WWeek page, I've only written two (at this point). Those are the ones with the picture of the cab next to them. The ones with the picture of the woman's eyes in the rearview mirror ARE NOT BY ME.

I would've thought that this was fairly obvious, until I got a letter from my sainted mother telling me that the column had her transfixed and that she had so many questions, but still loved me. When did I live in L.A.? What was this about an ex-boyfriend?

Granted, this rather hilarious misunderstanding is from someone who can be a little... clueless with the computer, let's say. But still, I think it's worth making as explicit as possible.

2007-04-19T05:05:00.000-07:00

2007-04-18T14:46:00.000-07:00

So I was able to make it through face-gate with only being called "hipster smegma" once. I'll consider that a success. The new column's up here.

2007-04-18T03:49:00.001-07:00

2007-04-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

2007-04-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

Soup Purse (mobile, circa 2006).

2007-04-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

Will asked for updates on music, so here is one, even though I am not at all plugged into music that is popular, or even really all that well known in underground circles.

Last night I saw 2 Oboes, my favorite band in Portland (pictured). I also got to see another band I really love, called Moodring, and the fabulous Waves of Nightengales. I'm forgetting who else... Paraquat, who's a valued friend. I slept through a set by Eet, who I also love tremendously. I left early because I was thinking about going to another show (Master Musicians of Bukkake and Neung Phak) that I was really excited about. If I'd stuck around I could've seen Soup Purse, the Reproachables and Eet again. This show was at my old roommates' house, and featured a potluck beforehand. The only things I could eat were baba ghanoush, bread, onion rings, and the cake that I brought. Being vegan can be lame sometimes.

I stopped by my house on the way to the second show, and got entranced by Casino Royale, which my roommate was watching. I didn't end up making it to the other show, or starting work until 1:45 AM. I don't like James Bond movies, or action movies at all really, but I thoroughly enjoyed that one.

I also liked that I only worked for 3 hours, and still made what I do on a mediocre 8 hour week night. It's good to be lucky, and even better to be both lucky and good.

2007-04-14T04:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry that I forgot to post one yesterday, so here's two. Yay camera phone!

2007-04-12T05:35:00.000-07:00

Carved from a lettuce heart. I'm not the one who did the carving.

Good Lord, NO PHOTOGRAPH FOR TODAY

2007-04-11T06:06:00.000-07:00

Nothing will happen today. Nothing at all. They forgot to publish the paper. There was no first column, and there was no horrible face of a disturbing looking man who is not me, and possibly stepped out of a Toad the Wet Sprocket music video.

The column will begin next week. That will be my first column.

Does everyone understand?

Nothing happened today.

THIS IS NOT A POINT WHICH CAN BE ARGUED.

If you know what's good for you, you will remember this.

Nothing happened today.

I'll post a link to the first column, when it appears next week, on the 18th.

2007-04-10T04:25:00.000-07:00

I don't know what the deal with Cabbie X in Eugene is, which is why I haven't been responding to inquiries. Well, that and laziness.

Speaking of which, I've finally added a link to an incredible New York yellow cab driver's photoblog. He's a much better photographer than myself on every level. I'm just a guy who takes snapshots and doesn't have any photographic training or pretensions on any level, but these are from someone who has a very good idea of what they're doing. Not only that, but he's got a fantastic eye for composition. His photos do a remarkable job of capturing what the world actually looks from the driver's seat (and it often looks quite beautiful and entrancing, something I always fail at capturing in mine, or never think to pick up the camera) - note the way he often includes the window frame and sideview mirror.

I'm pretty embarassed that I hadn't had a link up before, and can't reccomend the site highly enough, as it's one of my favorites. Given my change in direction here, though, there's really no excuse at all. If you're only going to look at one cab driver's pictures, they definitely shouldn't be mine.

But you should still look at mine. And everyone else's.

Soul Doubt

2007-04-09T03:28:00.000-07:00

Starting this Wednesday (4.11.7), I will be the Willamette Week's new Night Cabbie. This is the writing job that I'd mentioned before. They'll be publishing one 250-word column a week. That's why I haven't written anything here in four months: so that I can write far shorter pieces with far less frequency, all while getting paid (a very little) and read by (a lot) more people .

I am, in short, a sellout.

If for some reason you enjoyed my writing about my job (and if you're still checking back here at this point, chances are that you probably did), you'll be able to get your fix here starting on Wednesday (the ones with the picture of a woman's eyes in a rearview mirror are obviously not mine). I should warn you, however, that four of the first six are just re-worked posts from this site.

Anyway, now you'll be able to tell all of your friends that you were down with the Night Cabbie before he even was the Night Cabbie. If you're not from Portland, this won't get you much in the way of cred, but at least you can take solace in the knowledge that it won't get you much cred in Portland, either.

Another indication of my selling out is that I now have a MySpace page, which people who know me will attest to being a likely sign of the apocalypse. I'm told that it's the way to pimp oneself out on the cheap, and I'm certainly cheap. You're more than welcome to be my internet friend there, as you already are here.

I don't plan on advertising this site on either the MySpace or in the paper. I like it as my private little corner of the internet, and am hoping that it will stay that way. This is my anonymous anonymous website, whereas I guess the other two are my common-knowledge anonymous websites.

2007-04-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

So I've decided what to turn the blog into: a photographic blog of things that make me happy. The next writing project (details to follow in a day or two) will be much darker than even this one was, so I thought it would be nice to just change the direction of this completely. I can't write about anything job-related, but some of the pictures inevitably will be. I also don't plan on doing much in the way of writing here, so expect very minimal context. Hey, obscurity can be fun.

We might as well start out with the whole reason I even have a job in the first place. Though money in and of itself doesn't make me particularly happy, it's a very useful tool. And I like useful tools.

This is the way money looked when I was a kid. Now, when I see the odd old school bill, I get all nostalgic.

What's Goin' On

2007-03-19T03:44:00.000-07:00

Howdy,

Sorry for the delay in posting an update, some things had to be finalized. Unfortunately, I haven't been in secret negotiations to become a movie star like Danny DeVito.

What has been happening (among other things) is that I've continued to write about my experiences as a cab driver, and that anyone who wants to will be able to start reading about them again relatively soon (a couple of weeks).

So why haven't I been posting these writings here?

Someone has agreed to pay me for writing about my job, and to not only pay me but publish those writings both in print and on the internet, and expose them to a much larger audience than this website offers. No, I didn't turn into a big book star like Melissa Plaubt, and this isn't going to make that big of a difference to my checking account, but it will raise my literary profile a tiny little bit (to the extent that I'll actually have a tiny literary profile now).

The catch is that I can no longer write about my job in this space.

I've been thinking about other things that I could write about here, as I did enjoy having a blog much more than I expected to. I've had several ideas, but none has really grabbed me. There are two that stick out more than the others:

1) As I've mentioned on several occasions, I saw this blog mostly as a way of writing about my job as a struggle between and my own misanthropy. As it was much more interesting to me, my writing tended more toward the misanthropy side of the equation, and I never wrote much about myself or experiences that keep me from fully becoming the misanthropic troglodyte I fear. So I was thinking about turning this into a "feel-good" blog, or at the least the kind of mundane "recounting of daily activities" type of thing that most blogs are.

2) Turning it into a review site for local bars and restraunts - mostly somewhat serious reviews of late-night and fast cuisine (cabbie food) and snide and sarcastic reviews of bars based solely on their clientele. This is made somewhat problematic in that addition to being sober, I'm now also a vegan.

Both of these seem like decent enough ideas, but it's hard for me to envision either of them really compelling me to post with semi-regularity in the same way that my job did. I also doubt either of them would be quite as interesting to other people. We shall see. As the burning bush told Moses, "I will be what I will be." It wouldn't hurt too much to keep checking back, but I make no promises.

I'll post another update with details when publishing happens.

Thanks to everyone who read and enjoyed the website, and to all of the other cabbies whose blogs I love and don't read frequently enough anymore, but will still compulsively devour for full afternoons every couple of weeks.

Off-Duty

2007-01-17T06:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay in writing. I won't be posting anything for a while. I apologize that this is happening just after I started being productive again, but something's come up.

Don't worry, it's a very good "something" (for me, anyways), and I'll be back to explain it as soon as I can.

Take care,

Crabbie

The Trials of Oregon Cabbies on the Internet

2007-01-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

I got an email from CabbieX, a driver down in Eugene, and writer of the wonderful Through A Windshield, Darkly. His Blogger site's been hijacked, and re-directs to a porn site. I'm thus taking down the link until he gets things straightened out, which hopefully won't be in too long. I'd encourage other people who may have it linked to do the same.

(EDIT: This had been a reference to a broken Night Cabbie link, but the link is now fixed. Thanks, Wil!)

In related news, I added a link to the wonderful This Fare City about a week ago. Michelle's also a cab driver in Portland, and is being bothered by a cliched hack down in San Francisco who claims trademark on an old and not particularly unique pun. I'd strongly encourage you to check out her site - female cab drivers, especially at night, have to deal with just about all of the same issues I do, plus some ones I thankfully don't.

I'm leaving comment moderation on for a little while longer, as I'm a little weary after the mini-drama of a week ago. It will hopefully not last much longer, and I'll likely be back with a more proper post later tonight/early tomorrow morning.

Maybe You Should

2007-01-07T05:47:00.000-08:00

The daytime superintendent is a real classic, an archetypical cab superintendent. Picture Danny DeVito on Taxi only with German ancestry, more hair (tightly plastered into a tight part), and a few more pounds. He excels at the snappy repartee that cabbies have always been famed for in a way that I likely never will, though he's got a few more decades in the game than I do.

(Sample overheard dialogue:

Daytime Superintendent: So you working tomorrow?

Lease Driver: I don't know, it depends on how my girlfriend feels.

DS: She feels good. I'll see you at five.)

But I do enjoy the rare chances where I both get to bust it out and actually have a snappy remark occur to me. Last night I get a call to pick up at a crumby dive strip joint in Gresham at around 2:10 AM. I knock on the door, and the bartender tells me my fares are coming right out. I get back in the cab. After three minutes, I start the meter. After two minutes, I got out to tell them to get in or I was leaving, and the bartender meets me on my way in to say that they're coming. I get back in the cab, and a couple more minutes pass.

Eventually, two young black women with bad wigs and body glitter come out laughing, and I help them load their suitcases in the trunk. We get in the cab.

"Does the meter start at $5?" one of them asks.

"No, it starts at $2.50."

"Then why's it saying $5.10?"

"Because I turned it on after waiting for three minutes."

"We didn't know you were out here, he didn't tell us."

"I'm sorry, but we start the meter after three minutes. It's the busiest time of the night for us, you're lucky I didn't take off."

"You need to start the meter over," very angry now.

"No, I'm sorry, but that's both company policy and what I do when people make me wait at this time on a Saturday night."

"That's not our problem!"

"Yes, ma'am, it is, because you're the ones who were taking my time and money by making me wait. Look at it this way, don't you get annoyed when people sit at the rack but don't tip you?"

"People do that all the time!" the friend/co-worker chimes in.

"And you're cool with that?"

"We can call another company," the first one says

"You'd rather wait the half hour it'll take another cab to show up at this time of night than pay an extra $2.60 that you rightfully owe me anyway?"

"You need to start that meter over, or we're calling another company!"

"Okay."

I pop the trunk, and start unloading their bags.

"Are you for real?" she asks incredulously.

"Since you apparently are, I unfortunately must be as well. Good luck."

"Oh, we already got that."

"Mmhmm. Say, did you ever think about why you're taking your clothes off at a shithole in Gresham for guys who don't even tip you?"

"No."

"Maybe you should."

I purse my lips, give a solemn and thoughtful nod.

"Yeah, you might want to give that one some thought."

I then perk up, smile, and wish them a good night.

On a "where are they now" note, I gave the award holder for dumbest person ever in my cab another ride tonight. We met in much better circumstances, and she seems to be doing her honest best to hold down her title, having developed a British accent that she sometimes forgets to keep up. You go, girl!

Suicide Bomber

2007-01-05T16:35:00.000-08:00

The drama yesterday took place before I even got in the cab.

I'd just paid my lease, and belatedly noticed that the superintendent had accidentally given me the wrong cab, the one I usually drive on Friday. Walking over to his office, I was almost hit by the door swinging open and a huge black man, maybe 6'4" and 260 pounds storming out, followed swiftly by the supe (not a small guy, but not nearly as big as this fellow).

My superintendent was evenly telling him to leave the premises, which he wasn't doing. Instead, he'd walk away, shouting nonsense things about how we needed to step off him. Then occasionally he'd walk up to the superintendent, who was standing in one spot, get his mouth within inches of the supe's face, and start snarling about how the superintendent had to get out of his face. The supe stood his ground and met the guy's gaze when he'd do this, and keep talking to him in a calm and even tone.

I just kind of stood behind my superintendent while this went on, arms folded and staring at the guy, with an eye on a nearby folding chair. I didn't have a chance in hell against the dude in any kind of one on one situation, but if something happened I was ready to try and gouge an eye or pull some WWF style sneak attack anyway. The thing about cabbies is that we pretty much have each other's back in situations like this, regardless even of company ties. I've pulled over to help a competitor with a violent fare, and have heard stories of them doing the same with us.

But the thing about the super is that I know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he's got my back. Which means that I'm willing to take a couple of cracked teeth or a broken bone if it means helping him out with a massive guy who's menacing him.

Eventually, a crowd of cabbies and a mechanic or two began to gather at the noise, and the superintendent was ringed by about fifteen more people adopting the same stance and thinking the same way as me. Only these people were much stronger and wider than me, and one or two of them had handguns.

The guy kept ranting and menacing, and the supe told someone to call the cops. The cops were called.

The guy kept stomping around yelling about how we were the ones who needed to leave the property, and would run up to people and yell "I'm a suicide bomber." Or about how we needed to go get our guns if we were going to come at him, because he'd whup all our asses (is he starting to sound familiar yet? great minds, I guess).

A cop car showed up, and the guy stormed out into the street and the cop was yelling at him to take his hand out of his pocket NOW.

He was not taking the hand out of the pocket, and the cop was yelling much louder with the NOWS, and he turned to walk away from her, down the tunnel and into the heart of the building. At this point, I ducked up some stairs. Not complying with police orders is often a bad idea. Especially if they involve taking hands out of pockets. Even more especially if the cop sounds scared. Even more especially if you're in Portland and you're black. He's probably not the kind of guy who reads the news, but a lot of people have been murdered by cops in the last few years for similar offenses. I didn't want to be caught in the cross-fire.

Anyway, the cop, who was this tiny (maybe 5'5") white lady, charged after him while calling for back-up, taser drawn. Two other big strong white guys showed up literally within seconds, and the tough guy was ushered out in hand-cuffs with his pants around his ankles. As they passed me, I heard one cop hiss in his ear, "no, I wouldn't hit you. I'd just break your finger first." Portland's finest.

I've turned comment moderation on for a while, until everyone (including me) can chill out a little bit. I hate feeling like (well, being) a censor, but am trying to figure out how to deal with a site that seems to be falling to the internet's typical level of discourse (anonymous, ad hominem attacks), and to be attracting readership I hadn't anticipated.

A Happy New Year

2007-01-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

I'd had much trepidation about working on New Year's Eve, but it ended up being perhaps the best one I've ever had. That it's one of the relatively few in my adult life that didn't involve me getting embarrassingly drunk of course helped, but it was good for reasons beyond that as well.

My first trip was my car's day driver. L's appeared here before, and is a real classic, a grizzled old Vietnam vet with a quick punch, good sense of humor, and government-given medical problems. I like him a lot, and was happy to give him a ride home at a discount.

While dropping him off, I was immediately flagged down by an extremely drunk middle-aged gay white man. He's a bartender who'd been called in to help prep for the night, and then gotten completely hammered. While driving him home, we talked for a little while about other cab drivers (he's been taking cabs in this city for over twenty years), and then out of nowhere he just started talking about a situation in my life that had been bothering me, and then started asking me questions that happened to pertain directly to insights I'd had about both myself and the situation earlier that day. I told him that he was starting to really creep me out, as we'd never met before. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said, "I'm a fortune teller, and I'm drunk." He left with me a somewhat optimistic statement about the situation (which I'd also arrived at earlier in the day), and we shook hands after he gave me a $10 tip on a $30 trip. I thought about giving him my card, but didn't. I enjoy allowing the occasional magical strangers who wander briefly into my life to remain cloaked in mystery, it makes the encounters that much more wonderful.

It was an auspicious start to the night, both financially and inter-personally. I started cruising back into town with an eye toward getting a sandwich and a cup of coffee, but suddenly my headlights dimmed, the MDT started acting up, and both radios (AM/FM & dispatch) stopped working. Knowing what was going on, I called up the supes on my cell, and they told me to try and bring the cab in, that they'd save another for me. The alternator finally died while I was waiting at a red light about 15 blocks away from the garage, and one of my superintendents showed up to wait for a tow with me. This gave me opportunity to eat a falafel sandwich and chat with him, he's a really nice guy. And it was good to hear, in no uncertain terms, that he and others in high places hold me in high regard both personally and professionally. Thus them saving a cab for me when they could've leased it out to someone else.

I got back on the road, and things went smoothly. Everyone was cheerful and celebratory. I took some time off from around 11:30 to 12:30 to go to a party and see friends, catch-up after the holidays, eat an enchilada, and ring in the new year.

Around 1:15 I got a call at Emanuel. I was to pick up a hispanic man, drive him out to outer Northeast to pick-up a car seat, and then take him back to the hospital. One of those great trips I like so much, especially on New Year's at 1:15 in the morning, when I could reasonably assume that the guy would both actually be there when I showed up and not be drunk.

Another one of our cabs rolls into the hospital ahead of me, and knowing how good a trip this is, I call out to a man walking toward it by the name on my order. It's my guy. I explain this to the other driver (though not what he's missing), and we set out. I ask the guy how he's doing, and he explain to me in broken English that he's been with his sister. As best I can make out, his brother-in-law stabbed her (or did something to her) five or six times. The brother-in-law's in jail now. He thinks the brother-in-law must be on drugs or something. I try to console him a bit, and we settle into silence.

As we're about halfway there, he asks me if I like Mexican food. I tell him that I'm from Texas, I love Mexican food. I ask him why he bothered to ask, if he was a cook. He says yes. We then start talking about various Mexican dishes we love, he's excited that I seem to actually know about real Mexican food, not just Tex-Mex. As we get closer to his place, he asks me if I like posole.

If there's one thing Crabbie loves, it's some posole. I get it at a restraunt once or twice a month, though have never tried to make it myself. I tell him this, and he gets really excited and tells me that I have to come in for some posole, he and his nephew had made a bunch for New Year's, and it had just finished while he was at the hospital.

I pull into one of the beat-up, low rent apartment complexes that caters to recent immigrants. Somewhat sheepishly, I follow him around to his apartment, and he invites me in and introduces me to his cousin, his nephew, and his brother, who are sitting around drinking beers. They give me a big bowl of excellent home-made posole, some chopped onions, a cold Pepsi, tostadas, and an habanero. Their English is spotty, as is my atrophied Spanish, but we talk at length about food. They're all cooks at various restraunts around town (Asian restraunts, actually), and I tell them about my gourmet barbecue hobby. We talk about family and Mexico, and they tell me to give them their phone number for when they make mole. I keep thanking them profusely for the food and company, telling them how wonderful it is and how it's made my night, and I couldn't be more sincere.

We get the car seat and go back to the hospital. I'd assumed the trip would end here, but he starts to load an adorable an extremely sleepy little girl, maybe three years old, into the cab, and his sister starts to limp toward us on a crutch. While this is happening, some friends I'd told earlier that I'd give a free ride to call me up in a somewhat lame situation. I explain mine to them, and tell them I'll call them back after I can talk to him, as they're on the way to his place and small women who could sit in each other's lap.

But a woman from the hospital rushes out to shoo him and the girl out of the cab. She sternly explains that while the hospital has an account with our company, Oregon Health Plan has an account with a competitor, so that while I could take him to get the carseat, the competitors have to take the woman home. I tell her that they'll be stuck waiting there for hours (it's around 1:50) at this time on New Year's Eve, couldn't the hospital show a little consideration for a woman who'd been stabbed and her small child.

No, I'm told, rules are rules.

It occurred to me as I was pulling out without them that I could just say "fuck it," and give them a ride for free, but by this time I'd already told my friends I was on my way and felt compelled to get them. This man, his sister, and her daughter have haunted me since. I didn't think to give him my phone number in all the fuss with the hospital functionary.

It was a delight to pick up my friends, who were in good spirits and happy to see me and be in the warm cab with good music, and excited to be in a cab with me for the first time. I told them about my last trip, "your job is so exciting," they said. One of them wanted to spend a couple hours driving around with me, but that's against company policy.

I was really happy to see them, and shot up the freeway to their place with the intention of hanging out with them and listening to them and some other friends play music until around 3 AM, thus avoiding the bar rush entirely. Just as we were a block or two away from their place, though, a scraggly looking couple waved desperately at me.

"Sucks for them not to have your hook-up," I said.

"They had a little kid with them!" said my friend.

Fuck.

As I got out of the cab to go pee in my friend's house, the couple started shouting "send him back here!" I walked toward them, asked where they were going (far), and told them I had to pee and that I'd be right back.

I pulled up, and they piled in. We were around 55th & Glisan, and they needed to get to 52nd & Woodstock. How much will that be? they ask. "I dunno," I say, "ten to fifteen dollars."

"Fuck it, we're walking."

"No you aren't," I tell them, "I'm driving you."

The man's missing a tooth and carrying a mostly empty handle of whiskey. The woman's hair is stringy, her teeth are yellow, and her face and neck are a network of scabs and scars. There are track marks on her arms. It's 28 degrees out, and neither of them are dressed for it. Neither is the kid, who's already fallen asleep in my backseat and is an absolutely adorable four-year old boy.

They spend the whole trip complaining. About how the busses aren't running at 2:15 in the morning, about the "niggers" they got in a fight with at the Max stop, about how society's fucked and there aren't any good people. They argue with each other about who's fucked-up the most. Their language is as vile as mine usually is in this space, and the kid's audibly snoring.

I hate these people. I'm not racist, but I have biases, and these people have triggered all of them. I would ordinarily never take people like this, and I would ordinarily have kicked them out by now. But that kid's in the back, and I force myself to think about the kid. I think about how he's likely doomed, and that I cannot save him. I say very little, except when asked. And then no matter what I'm asked, I tell them that it's horrible what they have done to this child on this night. Except I use less polite language. They occasionally lapse into thanking me on a couple of occasions, offering to pay me with weed or booze. I tell them to shut the fuck-up, that I'm giving the kid a ride and they're just lucky to have been with him. None of this seems to sink in, the niggers and the city and the other partner are always to blame (especially the woman, as he'd been carrying a kid "that wasn't even his").

I drop them off and immediately turn to go back to my friends' house. Behind me at the intersection where I drop them off is a cop. I throw on my hazards, pull over, and wave at him to tell him about them, but he just drives by. It's probably for the best, it's not like the state would do wonders by the kid anyway.

The music was great, and at 3 I gave another friend a ride home and then went back to work. Everyone was kind, polite, in good spirits, and tipping well. I got a ride home from an ancient cab driver who I gave a tutorial on the MDT. He's a friend now, and involved in charity work in a field that I've always wanted to enter, but never known how. So now I've got an in, and I'm excited and grateful about that.

I hope you all had a great and safe night. This story is long and inconsistent both stylistically and in the tenses it uses. There are probably also multiple typos. I couldn't care less.

Despite what the parents of 2007 may think, there are good, humble, and courageous people in this world. One of the joys of this job is that I get to meet some of them sometimes, although I don't write about them enough here. They never do ludicrous things in my cab, so I don't write about them often enough. I'll try to do more of that, to remember these people and tell you about them, because there's a lot more to my job than the sad and crazy stuff, and I don't represent that often enough in this space.

Well, Never Mind

2007-01-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'd gotten home from work on New Year's to an anonymous comment containing a vague and baseless threat from someone who was way too sensitive about privacy issues. Thinking that the original anonymous moron* had been placated, I was ready to give-up with the assumption that Portland was just filled with hyper-sensitive jerks.

Instead, as this comment did indeed spring from my very first troll, I've decided to largely ignore it. Look dumbass: businesses employ many different people. Referencing where someone works is not an invasion of privacy if there isn't additional information contained that would identify them. Lots of people have jobs.

Indicating what city they live in is not an invasion of privacy. I'll even go so far as to say that saying something like "around a certain intersection" is okay when that simply narrows things down to 25-200 potential residences, depending on how one defines "around" and where in town it is.

I have, though, decided to remove all references to the company I work for. Again, there isn't anything on here which would cause me to be disciplined, and in fact (until I took them down, as they indicated the company) there were photographs on here which would have easily allowed management to determine who I am. I'm proud to work for what, as far as I can determine, is the best damn cab company in the U.S., for both the driver and the customer. So proud that I tried to get us some business.

That being said, there will always be unsavory aspects to driving a taxi cab at night. Weird and fucked up situations will arise, and reading about those weird and fucked up situations is probably why most people come here. The company prides itself on having earned such a good public image, and has done great things to drag itself out of the shadiness associated with the cab business. But if someone who doesn't understand that goes searching on the internet for a cab company in Portland, it's probably best if they don't come across my encounters with crack whores and then associate that with my company.

To the "cab driver's wife": you're not nearly as smart as you seem to think you are, and make yourself look like more of a fool with everything you write. Trying to be somewhat polite and explain things to you hasn't worked, so I'll strongly encourage you to just shut-up and go away. You don't seem to have much grasp of some basic aspects of the internet, which I don't have the tolerance to lay out at this point.

The other morning I had a nice, long talk with a friend who started with the company over forty years ago. He's perhaps the most senior and well-respected driver we have, just an amazing and truly decent and kind human being. He was telling me about how happy he was that so many of the racist, ignorant idiots had been given the boot.

He was talking about you. Not you specifically, of course, but drivers like you.

I gave you an opportunity to email me and get to know me, with an indication that I'd be happy to talk to you and let you know who I am. You didn't take that opportunity, instead choosing to threaten me and continue to yap anonymously about your paranoid fears and bigoted opinions. So you don't know who I am.

Keep that in mind: I may not know who you are (and I don't want to, at this point), but you don't know who I am, either. And as the past month has made clearer to me, who I am is one of the most respected and well-liked night drivers in the company. You can bitch and moan all you want about the "blacks" and the "Mexicans" and the food that gets puts on your table, but the fact of the matter is that you're a dinosaur, and I'm homo sapiens.

Like the guy whose picture you were upset was up here. He's not with the company any more. Another fat, paranoid, racist idiot that we got rid of. It's odd how the massive uptick in our business over the last couple of years seems to have coincided with the elimination of that kind of person, and the growing prevalence of young, creative, and open-minded people like me. A strange coincidence, I'm sure.

It's too bad you hated the website so much that you seem to have read the entire thing. That must have taken hours. I'm completely serious when I say that you should instead devote your time to something that brings you some enjoyment and fulfillment. Huffing paint sounds about right.

To everyone else, I'll be back with an update on New Year's, which will feature exactly some of the weird, fucked-up tidbits that you've come to know and love - including perhaps the best example ever of why I, for one, absolutely love Mexicans.

*There's a big difference between my "anonymity," which comes with the accountability and identifiability of a website and email address, and this person's. I'd happily use my first or last name, like Michelle, but both of mine are (un)fortunately very rare.

A Fare and the Fear

2007-01-02T05:57:00.000-08:00

This was also briefly deleted. Originally posted early morning of 12.31.6. Again, the original comments (one of which contained good vomit advice from wil) are gone.

A drawback to most really good fares (and I should say that by "really good," I'm thinking $50+) is that they often involve going, well, a long way away. Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy to go to Kelso or the southwestern boonies or Scapoose or La Center or wherever the hell the customer wants to go (San Francisco is the holy grail, I know a guy who scored that one). It just about always works out in my favor to take a trip that long, even if I end up far away from where I want to be. But the fact remains, deadheading is deadheading, and it's something I dislike and try to do as little of as possible. The best trips are ones like these, which somehow manage to run-up the meter and leave me someplace I actually don't mind being.

I had my ideal trip as a cab-driver tonight. At the beginning of my shift, I picked up a bartender just getting off at a bar in Northeast. Yesterday had been her birthday, and she and her boyfriend were shacked up at the Convention Center Holiday Inn. The problem was that she'd left her new movies at home, so we had to go out to her place to get the movies, then go back to the Holiday Inn.

She lives in Gresham, right off the Banfield.

So we drive out there while having a lovely conversation and mutually enjoying some Tribe Called Quest, she runs in and gets the movies, stops at 7-11, and we drive back. $60 on the meter, plus a decent tip, all for talking to a cool, hot, and intelligent woman and listening to music I love for half an hour. And at the end of it, I was only about 20 blocks away from where I'd started, and in the heart of my favorite stomping grounds. This trip turned what ended up being a pretty slow Saturday into a good one for me, and is one of those little moments of exultation that only other cab-drivers can really understand.

I had another trip tonight where I took five people from around Fremont & Kerby out to around SW Multnomah and Oleason. Thery were incredibly drunk, stupid, and obnoxious, and all I could think about the whole drive there was how drunk, stupid, and obnoxious they were. Then we get there, and one of them gives me a $10 tip on the $30 fare, and I have a higher opinion of them. Then the drunk one sitting up front stayed in the car, and I started to get annoyed, until he said that I was taking home. To Vancouver. I was ready to kiss him at this point (that's probably another $40-$50 and a pretty quick trip), but his friends started to cajole him out of it. I was really tempted to just peel out with my captive Vancouverite, but the $10 tip had earned them the right to at least give it a shot. Unfortunately they succeded, and I thus was not able to have my best night ever.

I'm going to work tonight (New Year's Eve). I am not happy about this. At all. Not because I've ever particularly given much of a damn about New Year's as a holiday (I haven't), but because I really, really, don't want to be driving a cab on the biggest amateur night of the year. I'm dreading it, and that's not an overstatement. I am frustrated and scared, absolutely terrified, that someone is going to throw up in my cab for the first time, ever (granted, I haven't worked a New Year's Eve before, and hadn't planned to). I've been told to have plastic bags on hand.

I have a feeling that I will be refusing many people service. It'll likely be a night when the standing rule gets enforced.

But even though my New Year will likely be ushered in with puke, stunning acts of idiocy, horrific driving, and (hopefully) a big roll of bills, that doesn't mean that I'm pessimistic about the upcoming year itself. In fact, I find myself unusually optimistic about it, and hope you feel the same way. Have a good and safe night.

(Oh, and Brian has a hilarious blog and some good advice

The Novemberist

2007-01-02T05:49:00.000-08:00

I'd deleted this as part of a plan to delete everything that involved anyone but myself, but as more has been revealed, it turns out there are not multiple upset people, just one idiotic one. Unfortunately, the original comments are gone forever. This was initially posted on 11.18.6.

11.18.6

I drove around members of a fancy major label band tonight after they got in from tour. I have never heard their music, but had been aware of them vaguely as being one of many bands from this town that have a name along the lines of "The (plural noun)," and that get mentioned by people who listen to rock n' roll.

Crabbie does not listen to indie rock, and frankly finds the shit to be excrutiatingly boring. Excrutiatingly. There are not enough words for how boring he finds it. He will tell his grandchildren in an adopted old world accent - "The indie rock, it was a very bad thing. I was make listen to it as I walk to school eight miles in cold, and when I grew up to be man, the first thing did I do was to urinate all over it and curse the people who make it to go to the most boring of hells for all eternity."

I'd also heard of them because very cool people who've actually heard their music make fun of them.

But I did not ask them questions like

"When did rock n' roll bands switch from being 'The (adjective) (plural noun)' to just being 'The (plural noun)'?"

or

"How is it that you're in a fancy pants rock n' roll band and live in such a shitty house in a shitty neighborhood?"

or even

"Why do hipsters think you suck?"

I kind of got the vibe that asking the questions I was most interested in might have negatively effected my tip. So I drove them home, and they were perfectly nice guys and tipped adequately, and I maybe shouldn't have been listening to the best band in town and accidentally proclaimed them to be "the best fucking band in town, man!" when the drummer (or was he the guitarist?) enthusiastically asked who they were, as it seemed to bum him out, because I think he expected the answer to be "John Coltrane" and not people who live in the same city as him.

So anyway, there's a story for all you hipsters in the audience. I still haven't heard a Decemberists song and honestly couldn't give a shit what they do sound like, or how cool they are, will be, or were. They are kind of nice and they tip okay and they take way too much shit with them on tour, and those are the only things that matter. Oh, and one of them has a really neat bike that folds in half.

Oh, and I'm playing a show tonight (sat. 11/18) at 2334 E Burnside. Starts around 6pm, we'll be on toward the beginning.

A Crab Dead

2007-01-01T06:47:00.000-08:00

Well, this is no longer relevant, but I guess I'll leave it up as a curiosity.

I'd just started to get back into the swing of things with this, and was all ready to tell you about my fascinating New Year's Eve, but I think that it's time at this point to kill this blog.

When talking about other people in this space, even the dishonest, abusive, and thieving ones, I've always made a real and sincere effort to mask their identities to the extent that no one would be able to recognize them except themselves. And given that I never had any ambition for anyone to read this save the people I know (I've never once asked anyone to link to the site, though I guess I never thought to ask them to take links down, either), I figured that they'd never come across it in the first place. Besides, this website was supposed to be all about me.

But as this seems to be the only taxi blog I've ever read where people are upset about privacy issues (even though I seem to have no Portland readers who aren't my friends), I'm going to just stop. I like my job, and I feel a very real and strong sense of loyalty to my company, (most of) my co-workers, and especially my superintendents. I don't want to jeopardize a situation where I'm happy, liked, respected, and well-paid. I also don't want to injure our business, and I very sincerely don't want people to feel like their personal information is being posted on the internet for their crazed stalkers to find.

I'm too exhausted now to start deleting everything, but sometime tomorrow I'll begin deleting every post that mentions the company I work for or another human being. So basically, all of them. This process might take a few days, so my apologies to those who are offended.

I may start another site that's more well disguised, tucked into a smaller corner of the internet, and truly known only to friends and family. This will allow them to keep tabs on me, and everyone else to continue not knowing or caring what I'm up to. If you're interested in knowing about the new site when/if it happens and are one of the friends I don't know in my "real" life, feel free to send me an email at crabbycabbie@gmail.com, and I'll send you the link.

Take care,

Crabbie.

C.R.E.A.M.

2006-12-30T05:15:00.000-08:00

So I didn't work tonight, or last night, however I should refer to Friday night. I've taken scrupulously good care of myself, and seen no improvement whatsoever in my condition. I have a feeling that this thing is going to nag me for a while. I'll go back to work on Saturday because I have to.

My mind has been very much on my money the past couple of weeks, and reading Liar's Poke r the past few nights has served only to focus my attention on it all the more keenly (in addition to not working).

I've never been particularly interested in money, or in being wealthy. I just never saw much point in money for money's sake, or in ostentatious displays of money. I've always seen money as a tool - it allows me to do things that I need (or want) to do, and I've thus always, no matter my income level, always managed to do a pretty good job of spending what I made, even if that involved saving for a while to spend on something particularly grand.

Recently, however, it's occurred to me that one of the things I might want to do is not live in dire poverty when I'm older. So I've been inquiring into various retirement strategies.

But this also feels a little silly to me at times, as there's very little in my history to suggest that I'll still be alive by the time I can draw from my SEP without penalty. So what, then, is the point of that? Now that most of my debt is gone, it's time for me to figure out what to do with the money that's left over at the end of the week.

Buying a cab is high on the list, and basically seems to be an idea so obviously good that the only mistake would be in not following through on it. But that will only add to the "problem" by likely increasing my income. There are only so many comic books that can be bought.

A girlfriend continues to seem like a good idea, I've always enjoyed sinking costs into dinners at good restraunts, vacations, and other such things that I enjoy a lot but seem to never do alone. There are actually a couple of promising leads in this department. On the other hand, lavishing all of my money on someone else seems unhealthy both personally and for a relationship, so as with the comic books, this is an expense that'll have to be moderated.

So what's been occurring to me lately is that I'd really, really like to make a movie. A documentary, so not a particularly expensive one. This seems like a good way of gobbling up a lot of dough, between learning how to do it and then filming, and then editing. It also sounds completely ludicrous, and I've never really been the "follow your dreams" type.

I've been thinking a lot, then, about currency markets, and/or investing in precious metals. Also about environmentally and ethically responsible mutual funds. Or shorting stocks. The thing is that I have absolutely no interest in acquring and then maintaining the knowledge necessary to act effectively in a global market, and I don't really trust the people who have put in that effort. I certainly don't believe that any of the ones who are actually good at it would ever deign bother with me and what would be a very tiny portfolio.

Another idea is starting a record label, which also seems like a good way of losing money. The trick, I suppose, lies in small-business loans. I don't feel like I have the social connections or skills to pull this off with much success.

The way this is related to driving a cab is that driving a cab is what brings me money. In case you haven't noticed, this blog has become more about what it is like for me to drive a cab, and how it effects my life, than about my interactions with customers. I'm hoping to have it also be about Portland, but I left my digital camera in Texas and have been holed up at home the past few days. Both of these things should be changing soon.

Ill

2006-12-29T04:18:00.000-08:00

I tried to work last night (Thursday). But it was verrrrry slooooow, and there were too many cabs on the streets, and I felt like shit. I shouldn't have tried to go to work in the first place. So the night involved me sitting in the cab (as opposed to driving it), trying to drink as many fluids as possible, listening to horribly scary sounds come out of my throat whenever I breathed too deeply, and feeling absolutely exhausted.

Having had pneumonia before, and given that my illness was behaving in ways very much at odds with how the doctor I'd seen while out of town had predicted, I got even more anxious as it became apparent both that I wasn't in very good working condition, and that I'd have to see another doctor, and soon. This was more than a little frustrating, as I don't have health insurance and had just spent large amounts of money on Christmas presents, plane tickets, and all of that other fun stuff in the past month. And not worked in a couple of weeks.

I'd been counting on two things: spending very little money in the next few weeks, and making a sizable amount of it this weekend. Plans (always a dangerous thing in this business) centered around these two assumptions, with an eye toward grand financial events whose foundations would lie in the simultaneous austerirty spending measures and higher amounts of income.

Instead, I actually ended up making a net of $.40 an hour for five hours work, unless you count the cab I had to take home, in which case I lost money. If you count the hospital visit (I figured what the hell, I was feeling horrible and unlikely to get to a discount doctor or clinic in time to be seen on Friday), I lost a lot of money. Given that I'm not working Friday night, and may not be working Saturday, I'm pissed, especially since I wasn't thrilled about working New Year's and was hoping a good weekend would allow me to bail out of it.

I am now officially in "bad financial shape" for the short term. I'll be able to eat and pay my rent and bills and everything like that, but the holidays/vacation/illness combination fucks me. And I'm so fucking angry, and the only one I have to blame for this situation is myself, and the decisions I've made to get myself in this position (paying down debt rapidly while only saving enough for a cab downpayment).

Fuck, I'm furious. I want to kick a dog, or have hours of hot sex with a beautiful woman, or engage in some other climactic physical activity which I'm not in any kind of physical shape for.

The point of this post, if there is one beyond indulging my self-pity and narcissism, is that sometimes there are very severe drawbacks to having a job where you aren't guaranteed a wage and your employer offers no benefits.

Vulgarity

2006-12-28T05:41:00.000-08:00

I hauled my sick ass out of bed long enough to go downtown and renew my taxi driver's permit. I'm now in possession of a really disturbing wheeze/cough, a receipt for $60, and a license to drive a cab through 2007. Let the good times roll.

The bureau of licensing or whatever it is happens to be in a building directly across the street from the building where I worked right before I started driving a cab (the old company's since moved). So I got to thinking about what all's changed since then.

The answer is really not all that much. I have a different schedule now. I'm marginally more lonely, but also a little bit more confident, so that's basically a wash. I'm significantly more financially secure and self-aware. I know the city and surrounding area a whole lot better than I used to. I live in a different house, with different roommates. I'm a little older.

But the biggest real difference I've been able to notice is the casual vulgarity that's crept into my life. It's not so much that my morality or attitudes have changed, but that I now exist in a world where it's somehow become normal for me to become involved in long discussions about female genitalia with Hungarian immigrants. Or for someone to casually fire up a crackrock in the backseat of a car I'm driving without asking. People start talking to me about the explicit details of their sex lives, sex wants, and sex philosophies all the time. I have frank rules about bodily functions that I quickly share with those who seem like they might need to be informed. I no longer blink at violence, and know several different ways of incapacitating someone in close combat. I know where a couple of brothels, a few after-hours joints, and a whole lot of different places to buy drugs are. Hell, I even spent about a month or so walking around with a switchblade in my pocket.

So even if my moral compass hasn't shifted, the terrain has become radically different. I've now come in close contact with some of the least savory parts of both the city and human experience. And what's interesting to me is that my non-work life has changed relatively little. I live my cloistered little life in a clean, comfortable, and decently appointed home in a part of the city that's clean, safe, and almost unbearably hip. My friends are mostly people I met at or through the small liberal arts college I went to: they're young, smart, beautiful, middle-to-upper class, and they're artists, teachers, researchers, students, etc. They're beginning fascinating, fulfilling, and glamorous lives.

And in casual conversations with them, I'll suddenly find myself starting to tell the story about the "stanky poosie", or about how I fought a man with cerebral palsy or got scammed by a meth-geek - I catch myself talking in this way, about these things, and see a weird look in the eyes of the person I'm talking to, a look that's a mixture of concern, disgust, and fascination. When I talk to friends about my job I feel like I've changed enormously, and it saddens and scares me. So I talk less, lose friends, and spend more time writing in my room.

But when I stop and examine that feeling, when I look at what exactly it is that's changed so drastically, the only thing I really see is this growing knowledge of and acquaintance with aspects of human existence that many people seem to consider disgusting or inappropriate.

So my apologies if I occasionally talk about sex, race, and the size of my cock like it's perfectly normal to do so. I'm not trying to be crude or boastful (my dick's high-average, but hardly gargantuan and only "big" if you're small... damn, I'm doing it again). It just seems to come all too naturally these days.

Feedback

2006-12-27T01:43:00.000-08:00

I've had cabs all over my mind this evening. I took one home from the airport, and felt myself both exhilarated and disgusted by the thought of going back to work in a couple of days. I'm convinced very firmly of two things at this point: that I need to buy a cab, and that I should be in another city pursuing an ambition a couple of years from now (these two impulses are not as irreconcilable or contradictory as they may seem).

When I got home, there was a delightful holiday present waiting for me from some friends, with the request that I "get back to writing [my] blog." Then I finally got around to checking my email, and received these comments, which initially made me angry until I realized how patently absurd they were. The blog has offered compelling visual evidence that I'm a white guy, and I'd offer the very fact that several people seem to have assumed I was black (and numerous pieces of indirect evidence contained in posts) as a relatively good basis for assuming that I have no deep-seated race hates for members of any particular ethnic group. There's also good evidence that I'm even chill with the handicapped and people who aren't heterosexual, I don't think I've ever discussed religion here.

Young? Guilty. Obsessed with my crotch? Equally guilty (who isn't?). The discussions of violence against women, not hitting on customers, and lack of a steady relationship would seem to suggest a general lack of sexism, oppressive machismo, or sexual objectification.

I'm not taking the time to defend myself from someone who serves largely to confirm another running theme (that while some of my co-workers are awesome, some others are absolute morons) because I think they merit rebuttal - they obviously don't. What's interesting to me is that my first reaction was "that's it, I'm not allowing any more anonymous comments."

Which is silly, of course, as I've intentionally kept myself anonymous to everyone save my friends and family (though if this woman refers my superintendents here with a complaint about the racist young nigger who listens to the hippity-hop in his cab, they'd probably be able to deduce who I was in about five minutes, provided they didn't also think I was black). I started this blog as a means of venting/exulting/meditating about my job in a way that people can access if they want to, and thus save my loved ones from having to hear me do these things too much in our face-to-face interactions.

What makes this space interesting to me now, though, is that people who have no idea who I am will occasionally stumble upon it, and build in their heads this character of a young cab-driver in Portland who may or may not be black, kind, generous, cruel, lazy, racist, lonely, uber-hip, funny, healthy, conceited, depressed, etc.

And I'd been thinking about how cool that was, and was going to check my email before I wrote an entry for R & M, and got more evidence of this phenomenon, and I thought it was very auspicious. So I'll probably be back to goofing around with this thing more often, but I'll warn you that this blog will likely be leaning more toward steam-of-conscious ramblings about work and the blog, and less toward recounting particular incidents that took place. It'll all be very meta-.

(That's fancy talk for "boring")

Why I Haven't Been Posting

2006-12-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

Sorry it's been so long.

There are a lot of reasons why I haven't been keeping this site up. The two most compelling are:

1) It gets dark at 4:30-5 PM here. I've placed a lot of emphasis on getting to sleep as early as possible, so that I can wake up as early as possible and get some sunlight. It's difficult to explain just how fucked-up and trying it can be to function on zero daylight. When it comes down to either bitching about work, or trying to live healthily, I will always choose the latter.

2) I've always been a writer, and I'd started this blog in the midst of a big slump, largely as a vehicle to get myself writing again. In that, it was succesful. I've actually been doing a lot of writing recently, only on another project. Again, it's an issue of scarce resources - I'd rather devote the time I have available to write (which isn't enough) to something that I find exciting and challenging, and not to rehashing my job.

And there are all kinds of other things: I wasn't happy with the blog's direction, I've been pulling myself out of what was becoming an increasing evident depression, I've been trying to cultivate a romantic life, I seem to have suddenly become a "musician" who "plays shows" (tonight [12/16] at the Cathedral on Mississippi), I'm bored with the internet, etc.

I have been thinking about this space, and what to do with it. It's good to know that there was someone reading and enjoying it, and that provides an impetus to try and re-integrate it into my creative life. I was thinking about this earlier tonight, actually, before I came home and got the anonymous comments in my email. The thing I've been working on draws heavily upon some cab-driving experiences (no, I'm not going all New York Hack and writing a memoir), and so maybe I'll start posting excerpts here or trying to think of other things I can do that will be both interesting and require little in the way of additional effort on my part.

But the important thing to keep in mind right now is that I'm so busy that I'm lazy. So lazy, in fact, that I'm not going to post a very excellent picture that would complement this post perfectly (maybe Monday). I will reccomend, though, the very excellent, Diary of a Mad DC Cabbie (too lazy to make a link, there's one in the sidebar). His blog's basically a much more entertaining version of what I wanted mine to be, to some extent I stopped because he was writing the blog that I wanted to write, so I started writing the book I wanted to read.

I'll hopefully be back in not-too-long.

Tired

2006-11-13T09:06:00.000-08:00

I need to go back to sleep right now. This is just a note to say that I'm back at work, and thank you to everyone for their kind sentiments. I'll try and write some proper stories down in the next day or two, but right now I'm pounding that pavement pretty hard in anticipation of the ER bill.

Cheers, and thanks again.

busted

2006-11-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

I got clipped by a car today (as a pedestrian). Skinned knees, stiff right elbow, severe contusion (but amazingly no broken bones) on left hand. I'm off the streets for tonight and the weekend, not scheduled to work again until next Thursday. On vicodin and not typing too swiftly for the next few days, blog will be pretty dormant for the next week (so basically, nothing new).

Stop the Presses!

2006-10-30T09:52:00.000-08:00

I was going to make this post about something else, but then I had my last trip of the night/early morning.

I got a call to take someone to the airport. A kid about my age came out, loaded down with bags. He's moving to St. Louis (which NPR told me on the ride back to the garage is now the most dangerous city in the U.S. - worse than Detroit or Compton).

Anyway, I of course asked him why he was moving to St. Lous. The answer?

He's going to start a band with some friends from his hometown in Southern California.

YES, SOMEONE IN THEIR TWENTIES IS MOVING OUT OF PORTLAND TO START A BAND.

If you aren't aware, this is like someone moving out of 60s era San Francisco to become a hippie. This is what people my age do - they move to Portland, and they start bands (or move here together, as an already existing band).

You see, I have the misfortune of living in the hippest city in the United States. Portland is the number one destination for inmigration for people between the ages of 20 and 35. Austin, TX isn't even that close, New York and L.A. are back in the dust. And we aren't just talking percentages here, kid, I'm speaking gross numbers. When I go back to one of my many "home towns" and talk to people there, all the ones my age be all like "Oo, Portland, I hear it's so cool there."

It's rare for me to talk to someone my own age who's lived here more than five years. For most of them, it's less than two.

And every single one of them is in a band.

(And I'm one of them, see? I'm cooler, though, because I've been here 8 years and am in 3 bands)

Anyway, I'd like to salute nice-guy-with-a-pentagram-tattoo-on-his-neck for moving out of Portland to start a band with his friends, even if I almost had a heart attack and nearly needed to pull over when he told me. You are the shit, sir, and are hopefully in the vanguard of a new trend.

I continue to enjoy the early morning fog, and to take pictures of it while driving (NOT SAFE, DO NOT ATTEMPT!). It should be noted, however, that its presence is an almost certain sign of global warming and the inevitable decline and eventual extinction of civilization as we know it.

Turn Back the Clock

2006-10-29T06:36:00.000-08:00

Daylight Savings Time ended tonight.

I've been dreading this day with increasing panic. Being so far north, and working nights, I will now be seeing even less of the sun. There will be stretches where it will have basically risen and set while I was asleep. It's not like you actually see the sun very often during the day time in the winters here anyway, what with all the clouds, but it's at leat daylight. Which I'll miss.

I'll pretty much have two moods for the next four months or so: suicidal and homicidal. Just so you've all been warned.

Oh, and if you want to share in all the joy, I finally got around to opening up an email account for people who feel the need to email me. It's creatively named crabbycabbie@gmail.com I've also added it to my Blogger profile.

The Fog

2006-10-28T06:50:00.001-07:00

It's been really foggy the last few early mornings, and I kind of enjoy it. It reminds me of living in the Bay Area (S.F. Bay). It also lets me get to see my co-workers do stupid things, like think they're turning onto the freeway, when in fact they're roaring into an empty parking lot at 50 mph.

(this particular co-worker isn't actually doing anything stupid, he's just chillin')

Something I love about Portland: occasionally, just occasionally, a washed-up looking drunk who I had to drag away from his seat at the video poker machine in one of our divier dive strip clubs will stumble into the cab after a few minutes and ask to go 15 blocks away. And it will be okay, because he will offer me some of the salmon he smoked that afternoon, and the salmon will (of course) taste wonderful. And my tip for the $4 trip will end-up being an excellent meal that I would've had to pay $20 for in one of those godforesaken places where they don't have salmon, and the washed-up drunks don't smoke it themselves. And it wouldn't have tasted nearly as good for that $20, either.

Only two people were wearing costumes, and neither of them was any good. I'm not working tonight, I'm going to go see the newly re-constituted Spacehawk, and will not have crazy Halloween stories for you. I'm perfectly happy with that.

Cultural Anthropology (Initiating Mating)

2006-10-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

Ways in which different ethno-cultural groups and sexualities hit on me:

Black women compliment me on my eyes.

Gay men compliment me on my beard (unless black, in which case they'll remark upon my eyes).

Bi-sexual men compliment me on my smile (unless black, in which case they'll remark upon my eyes).

Transexuals and cross-dressers compliment me on my dick size if I'm wearing tighter pants. If not, they compliment my face in its totality (unless they're black, in which case they'll remark upon my eyes).

White women tell me about how I'm the only cool guy they've met all night.

Asian women ask me to tell them about my life.

Hispanic women tell me how good a dresser I am.

Older white women ask me for advice on their sex lives.

And...

Crackheads offer to suck my dick for $4, or just let me see their breasts for $2.

(I wish so much that I'd just given her a dollar to take her fully-clothed picture, but for some reason that felt like it would've been just as exploitive)

Working hard, or?

2006-10-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

The most exciting thing that happened last night is that I watched a couple episodes of The Wire with my friends at the beginning of my shift. I did that Friday night as well. I've found my new attitude toward work to be immensely gratifying and relaxing. Each of the past couple of nights I only worked 7 hours, and still ended up taking home a net of around $22 per hour worked.

I love The Wire, I love my friends, and I love having a job where I can take the time out to appreciate them.

Award Tour

2006-10-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

So here's the deal: when it's a morning after work, I find myself without the energy or inclination to write about work. When I'm not working, I don't often feel like writing about work. So my apologies for the infrequent updates. I think a lot of this has to do with this blog becoming as narcissistic and masturbatory as I didn't want it to be. I'd like for it to go back to just being stories about my customers, but taking the time to write things out in detail just feels like a gigantic chore when I get home from work, and when I'm not working... etc.

Anyway, I'd like to recognize two people who won special "Crabbie's Finest" achievement awards last night:

DUMBEST PERSON I'VE EVER HAD IN MY CAB

This goes out to the woman I picked up around 3:30 AM. She got in, and told me about how she was having a rough night: she'd made dinner for a guy she'd really liked a lot and just recently met, and then they went out to a bar and got drunk. He got really drunk, and was being a complete asshole, and got the shit beaten out of him by six other guys. He got kicked out of the bar, and she was happy to see him go. Then she went back to her place, to find the guy there on her doorstep. He blamed her for his getting beaten up, and proceeded to punch her. She left, and went over to her friend's place.

She of course had my sympathy, and I was getting very angry, but she wouldn't let me call the cops.

Now we get to the award-winning part of the trip: it turns out that I was not driving her from her friend's back to her place (as I'd assumed), but was in fact just right then taking her away from her house and the guy who'd hit her. And the guy was still there. In her house. Where she'd left him.

Regular readers have likely picked up on the fact that Crabbie is not, by any means whatsoever, a big fan of the police. At best, he treats them with mild disdain. But he understands that the Portland Police Bureau is good for a couple of things other than shooting unarmed mothers in the back and pepper-spraying babies. One of the things they are good at is getting creepy drunk guys who've hit you in the face and won't leave your house to, well, leave your house. In fact, if you're a woman, they'll probably be kind enough to punch the drunk guy a few times for you (and if you're lucky, they'll even leave him to die on the sidewalk, while never bothering to call cab drivers who come forward as witnesses to his death).

But about the dumbest fucking thing you can do in this situation is leave the drunk guy you don't know and who has just hit you in the face alone in your house for the night.

This woman claims the award from the guy with cerebral palsy who started a fist-fight with me. They're big shoes to fill, but I'm sure she'll do her best.

The next award is:

SHORTEST TRIP ON THE METER

This is one that I never thought I'd see topped. A bartender called a cab to go to her apartment 4 blocks away. Her reason being that she didn't feel comfortable walking at that time of night in that neighborhood - there were a lot of sketchy people around. As perfect illustration of her point, an incredibly sketchy drug-addicted fellow tried to talk me into giving him a ride through the window as I dropped her off. I turned him down to take an airporter.

This trip was all of $2.90 on the meter (flag drop is $2.50). She claims her award from the dissipated alcoholic who went from the 82nd Ave Bar & Grill to Spot 79, and the regular who goes from the Alibi to the hotel two blocks away (his trip costs more because it involves waiting for a left-turn signal to make a U-turn). Both of these fine fellows clocked in at $3.10. I don't think this young lady's ever going to be beat. Tied, maybe, but I don't think $2.70's attainable. $2.90 is like Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game, it just can't be beat.

Please don't make any special attempt to prove me wrong.

She also gave me a $7 tip, which makes her a double winner and immediate inductee into the Crabbie Hall of Fame.

I don't know how to fix whatever happened with the font/formatting, and I don't really care.

I heard I'm still alive

2006-10-16T03:16:00.000-07:00

I almost died last night.

I had just picked up my cab and was beginning my shift. As is fairly usual, I turned the meter on and "soon to cleared" zone 111 (inner southeast), and got onto 405 southbound, with the expectation of hopping over the Marquam Bridge and getting to work. It had just rained, and the roads were slick.

Getting onto 405 from NW 16th, you're immediately placed in an "exit only" lane that takes you directly onto the Sunset Highway (the exact opposite direction from where I wanted to go). I was going at a relatively slow speed (about 45 mph, speed limit's 50) due to the weather conditions. As I merged onto the highway proper, a car merged in behind me at about 65-70, and there was another car in the center lane (left of me) going about my speed, maybe a little faster. I had my turn signal on, and the guy in the center lane was neither slowing down nor speeding up to facilitate my merge, and the car behind me was riding my bumper. With the off-ramp to Sunset fastly approaching, I accelerated and attempted to merge left.

This is where I lost control of the cab and began hydroplaning.

I ended up doing a complete 360 degree spinout in the middle of the freeway, and was stopped by the curb (thankfully just a regular curb, and not a Jersey barrier) on the shoulder of the lane I'd started in. That I wasn't hit by another car is, frankly, miraculous.

This is one of now four close brushes with death that I've had. For those curious, I've never had my life flash before my eyes, or ever thought in anything but the most mechanical and detached ways when it's happened. There's always an awareness that I'm in a situation that could potentially be the last situation I'm ever in, but instead of panic, I find myself just matter of factly thinking of things that can be done to increase the odds of finding myself in future situations. I remember very vividly what was going through my head each and every time, tonight it was "steer into the swerve, don't use the brakes, brace for impact."

That I wasn't hit came as such a huge shock that it was a good 5 to 10 seconds before I could think or move to tell the dispatcher what had happened. No cars stopped to help me. I got off the freeway with the wheel shuddering in my hands, and inspected the car. No apparent damage to the cab, except for the front passenger's side tire being knocked out of alignment from where it hit the curb. I babied it back to the garage, filled out an incident report, and went over to a friend's. My night was over without picking up a single fare.

The superintendent assures me that I won't be fired over this, but I'm still pretty shook. I've always prided myself on being a safe driver. I was hired with a completely clean driving record, and still have one. I've driven in Portland for 8 years, and learned how to drive in Dallas, Texas - where the speed limits are higher, the winter rains much heavier (if less frequent), and the drivers completely insane. When I was nine, my father broke his neck when a cab he was in on a business trip in San Francisco hydroplaned on the freeway and ended up rolling over.

I've always been extremely conscious of driving safely, and especially so in slick driving conditions.

Now this shit.

I don't know - I'm going to get completely reamed by the Safety Board. I'm not going to be able to buy a cab for even longer than I'd anticipated. But right now, at this particular moment in time, I'm just freaked out that this happened in the first place. I need to completely re-evaluate my opinion of myself as a driver, because as the superintendent told me (even as he was comforting me) - "if you hydroplaned, you screwed up and were going too fast."

And he's correct, and I almost got myself and other people killed or seriously injured because of it.

It also occurs to me that I should've checked the tread on the tires, after I took the cab in, because the guy who owns it is a notorious cheapskate and selfish bastard. I didn't think to take pictures for the blog either. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there and over to my friend's house, where of course I just felt weird and freaked out anyway.

sweet

2006-10-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

My new "I don't give a fuck" attitude has been working wonders. Last night was very enjoyable - I took time off to get gourmet ice cream with my friend Todd, and spent some more time goofing off with my roommate (meaning he drove me back to the garage to pick up an extra set of keys, as I again locked mine in the cab).

I did a larger amount of personal business tonight than usual. Recently I've added a guy I knew in college as a regular customer, and tonight I added the kid who washes dishes at the ice cream place, who I've driven before. He moved here alone at 18 from Mexico, and is putting himself through school. I've driven him before - just an extremely nice guy who's been working extremely hard at making a better life for himself. He doesn't tip, but I really like him a lot. I'll be happy to run out of my way to pick him up.

Not much in the way of crazy stories tonight. My last fare and I talked about politics. I typically get annoyed when talking about politics with people up here, as most are misinformed and/or naive and/or overly simplistic (George Bush is a moron is what it always seems to boil down to). This guy was none of these things, and he was drunk, so the conversation was fun.

Something he said leapt out at me - "the genius of these guys [Republicans] is that they've managed to equate dogmatism with patriotism and pragmatism with disloyalty." As someone who studied the phenomenon a great deal in school, this is perhaps the most concise and accurate definition of facism that I've ever heard. Fun times here in the ol' U.S. of A.

Something else mildly amusing happened, but I forget and don't particularly care. I accidentally gave the gas jockey a 50 instead of a 20 when I filled up at the end of the shift, and didn't realize my mistake until I got home. But, alltogether now...

"I just don't give a fuck."

I am a very zen cabbie.

Mercy

2006-10-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

I worked last night for the first time since the night that made me so angsty, pissed-off, and just flat out crabby. It was better, I've decided to adopt a new attitude toward work that will hopefully make things less stressful when they get bad.

This attitude is one of "I don't give a fuck."

It's wonderful. I spent the first three hours of my shift hanging out with friends. Hell, I don't think I actually picked up a fare until 10:30. I've basically decided that I'm going to start working like an owner, even though I still have to pay a lease. I won't be making as much money, but this is fine. I've got enough saved up for a down payment on a cab, and there just isn't really any pressing reason for me to be making as much money as I was. I don't have a family to support, so why bust my ass to make enough money to theoretically do so?

A fair amount of story-worthy things happened last night, all involving women. The most interesting encounter involved driving Mercy Corps' (Crabbie's favorite charity) former deputy director of country for Afghanistan to the air port. I don't remember enough of the conversation to attempt a re-creation here, as I don't want to mis-represent some very nuanced points she was making.

Things I learned:
It's very different being a western woman in Afghanistan in terms of the way men treat you.

They get along pretty well with the Taliban, as they've been in the country for over 20 years and are known and respected. Turning down money from the U.S. government likely helped in this regard.

When she told me that she focued most of her energy while there toward agricultural development, I asked her the obvious question - "what compelling reason can you possibly give an Afghan farmer to not grow poppy?"

Her answer was basically that there isn't one, aside from the moral and religious ones. She explained to me just how much of a miracle crop poppy really is - part of its hardiness is that it's remarkably drought resistant, and it can also be stored for up to 7 years.

We talked a lot about Muhammad Yunus, of whom we're both big fans. I was really, really happy when I heard that he won the Nobel Prize.

Basically, I really love it when I'm able to have intelligent, informed discussions in the cab with people who are, well, truly intelligent and informed. As opposed to, say, drunk people who went to a liberal arts school and watch "The Daily Show." I get them sometimes - this woman, a really cool developmental economist famous in economic circles for hating on classical development economic theory, the nation's leading expert on wind power, etc.

I need to go back to college. This is what the combination of last night and the cranky night has convinced me of.

The 50th post is negative

2006-10-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was so wonderful. I had a fantastic time playing a show in such a wonderful environment, and on a rediculously gorgeous autumn day. Our set went well, and I was just so happy and proud to know and love people who make such beautiful music (I'm not talking about my thing here, but my friends'). I left feeling absolutely wonderful, just incredibly happy and really and honestly in love with life.

Then I went to work.

I just don't want to get into it at this point. I made decent money, especially for the hours I worked, but I was nearly in tears at several points. It was like instead of a "kick me" sign, someone put a sign reading "crackheads, people without enough money, and drunk people who are humungous assholes for no discernible reason - WELCOME!"

I hated my fares. And hating my fares reminded me of just how incredibly wonderful I'd been feeling at and after the show. And this made me hate my job. And hating my job made me want to just turn the cab in. And wanting to turn the cab in made me hate the company, because there aren't any cabs available to purchase, and upper management (but certainly not the superintendents or dispatchers, who LOVE me) is angry at me for this incident. Which made me hate upper management, as the supers see my self-reporting as demonstrating integrity, a character trait which I've found has done me far more harm than good in this business.

Which made me hate my job even more.

And all of this made me very conscious of the fact that I'd be sleeping alone, and have no one to come home to and snuggle with and kiss and tell stories to. Which reminded me that my job makes the prospects of finding such a someone exceedinly dim. Which made me hate my job more. Which reminded me of the way too many gorgeous, intelligent, and caring women I know - all of whom, of course, have either boyfriends or no interest in someone who works nights and weekends. Which made me hate my job even more.

This made me think about getting a new job, except for the fact that this dead-end job pays literally twice as much as any other dead-end job I could get, and allows me to save to go back to college. A realization which made me hate my job more. But I can't get a girlfriend to spend all the extra money on, or go out with my friends, because... I have a fucked up schedule. Which made me ready to burn the garage to the fucking ground.

The guy at 4:45 in the morning who had his 8 pieces of luggage in the driveway along with his wife and two small children spilling yogurt all over themselves and said "gosh, I forgot to ask for a mini-van, didn't I?" has no idea how close he came to death.

So now you know why so many cab drivers are misanthropic troglodytes with copies of "Death Hunt" that may or not in fact actually be porn in their glove compartments: because they are sad and lonely and sexually frustrated and feeling sorry for themselves. And you, knowingly or not, have likely just done something to fuck with them.

I'm listening to So now, and things are not quite so bad. I think I may have driven myself to on-line dating, which seems like a good place for misanthropic troglodyte cab-drivers with some youth and looks left to meet their female equivalents.

(Actually, our female equivalents are strippers, and they don't take out on-line personals unless they're looking for some side business. I guess I'm better off just continuing to hope that the woman of my dreams will magically knock on my door at 3 AM some Wednesday morning)

If you haven't quite picked up on it yet, tonight was the first night I've ever truly hated my job.

Raw

2006-10-07T06:47:00.000-07:00

Last night was completely lacking in any of the whackiness one would expect from the Friday night and full moon tag team. Very mellow, and I had a good time.

John Lennon's birthday is today, and KBOO had a Lennon marathon starting at midnight. I'd been dreading it. Yes, I can understand and appreciate that the Beatles made absolutely incredible pop music, and were brilliant in such a varied and sustained fashion that to even call them "the best band ever" is almost an insult, because it implies that they can even be compared to other bands. There's the Beatles, and there's everyone else.

I know this, I understand it, and I agree with it.

And I also would be entirely happy if I never heard another Beatles song in my life.

But tonight, thank fully, the guy didn't play much from Beatles studio recordings. Whole lot of bootlegs, especially of Lennon alone or with a drummer. Experiments in tape loops and cut-ups. After tonight, I now understand why people are so into his stuff (I'd listened to very little of his solo stuff before).

I'm totally on board - John Lennon was the shit, even more ahead of his time than I'd ever realized. I'd never got just how experimental a musician he was, I always saw him more as a guy who did a lot of drugs with his hippie girlfriend and bastardized pre-existing genres (not that there's anything wrong with that). Which, of course he was, but he also was up to some really neat shit, too.

If only someone would devote a similar night to Brian Wilson.

So basically I listened to the radio last night.

Speaking of pop genius, though, the inimitable Lord Uncooked will be making a rare appearance this afternoon at The Hostel (2334 E Burnside), provided the front-man can wake up on time. Word on the street is that he's a cab driver too, you should check it out.

Show's from 3-7 PM, there will be good food and many other excellent musical acts.

It's on

2006-10-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

Last night I drove around and talked to drunk people. Yeah... not a whole lot to report. The highlight was driving two very drunk long-time friends, a white man and woman, and they were talking about how they'd had sex five years ago. The woman didn't remember, and they spoke a great deal about it - it was obviously a new and significant piece of information. What made the conversation especially amusing was that they didn't want to refer to the act specifically with the cab driver around, so they just constantly referred to "it."

I helped save somebody's life by rushing blood from the Red Cross to Good Samaritan at 2 AM. That probably cost me about $30 or so. The whole deliveries thing isn't something I've really covered before, as it's really a very boring subject (the deliveries never do stupid things or tell me stories). Maybe that's something I'll do in the next week or so.

Go to the show tonight (125 NW 5th, doors at 9, the good stuff'll be around 10-10:30), your world will be rocked.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

2006-09-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

I'm tired, and nothing particularly compelling happened last night. One guy was an enormous asshole, and another guy threw-up in the cab (my first time!), but there was not a large volume of vomit, and except for two droplets, he got it all on himself. I didn't charge him the $50.

I did a lot of waiting - at various points I had to wait for three drawbridges and a very long freight train. I still had a good night financially, and got to have a good conversation with a gorgeous girl while waiting for the freight train. I gave her my card, and she will not call me. Such is my life.

The aformentioned Soriah will be playing a show with The Venerable Showers of Beauty in Portland this Sunday (10/1) at Someday, a new club at 125 NW 5th (look at me, I be using links like a motherfucker). Rumor has it that a couple of other cab drivers are going to be involved, so you should check it out. This show will be very, very good, a feast for the eyes and ears. You will be supporting arts and cabbies at the same time. Doors at 9, cost is $10, and you get to see me in the flesh. This is not normally my scene, and I cannot at all vouch for the other acts, but you have the Crabbie word of honor that the Soriah set will be dope as all fuck, and quite possibly one of the better shows you've seen all year.

If you're not in Portland, I'm told that there will be simultaneous streaming on the Someday page, but I know very little about such things and care even less, as all the cool kids will be there in the flesh.

5-0!

2006-09-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

So yeah, sorry I never posted about what happened last Thursday. I've been captivated by a good book, various football related things, the fallout from the smelly lady, and playing music. But I promised you a story that involved the cops, so a story about the cops is what you're going to get.

Early Friday morning, like around 4 AM, I take a call to pick up at the Hot Cake House, a 24 hour greasy spoon at the foot of the Ross Island Bridge. I pull up, and a white guy at the jukebox waves to me, but takes his time coming out. Then we have to wait for his two extremely drunk friends to get in.

They're all prototypical middle-class white guys - golf appropriate casual wear and baseball caps. It strikes me as odd that men of their profile are out as late, and as drunk as they are, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if I showed up to a call at 5 AM on a Tuesday to be greeted by a shitfaced Bill Gates. People of all races and socio-economic statuses (stati?) be gettin' drunk, that's why I have a job.

There's much discussion between the two friends about what they're going to do - one of them's very interested in going over to a woman's house, and proceeds to have a loud, clumsily flirtatious conversation with her on his cell phone. The original guy's adamant that he's going home, however, so I drive to his place in Southwest, near the Burlingame Fred Meyer.

The trip isn't particularly pleasant. After the cell phone conversation ends in a "no go," the two drunk friends proceed to do a lot of very loud, very drunken, good-natured yelling at each other. Mostly along the lines of calling each other "dumb Mick" and "stupid Kraut." When we roll up to the first guy's house, I have high hopes for them all getting out.

The guy who lives there leaves, doesn't offer me any money. The other two stay in the backseat and try to figure out what their next move's going to be. It seems to me like the obvious answer for anyone as drunk as they are is "go to bed" - how they have any energy at all is astounding to me. Eventually, their conversation works its way around to two options:

Option A: Go into their friend's house, play blackjack, and drink his beer.

or...

Option B: Go to La Center!

I'm very excited option B. La Center's a small town about 15-20 miles into Washington with a bunch of Indian casinos. The meter's already at $15, and it would be a very good trip for me.

The question arises: would I do it for a flat rate of $80?

I'd never driven to La Center in the cab, and tell them that I'd have to do it for the meter, as I didn't remember how long the drive was. More discussion. They decide to go inside and talk to their friend. While they're inside, I look up the mileage and estimate that a trip out to La Center, given where the meter already is and where we are in Portland, would probably cost about $70. I'll make a show of insisting on the meter, given the possibility of their being the kind of drunks who would insist on taking a scenic route, but will do it for $80 if that's they only way they'll do it.

After a few minutes, they stumble back out to the car. Will I do it for $80? No, I'll do it for the meter. Would I do it for $100? Hop in, fellas!

And we're off. The cab has a tapedeck, and I'm listening to something weird and spacy that I've turned down low. They ask if we can listen to music, and what kinds I like. I respond with "blues & jazz" - genres I figure we'll all be able to tolerate, but also mention that I like hip-hop and more experimental stuff.

Much commentary about how they love hip-hop, but old stuff. Really old stuff - Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, Cold Crush Brothers, etc. Much lamentation of how no one had even heard of it these days. I try to explain that I can play them some, but there's adamant refusal that such a thing is possible. I reach into my bag and pull out an old bootleg mix-tape of excellent old school hip-hop I'd bought on a street corner in Greenwich Village, and put it on.

Suddenly I'm the shit. What's my name? What am I? A Kraut? Awesome! Much discussion of Krauts, Swedes, Pollacks, blacks, and Irish, as well as how awesome my music is. Eventually the conversation somehow turns to Tupac and Biggie, and who might have killed them. The guy sitting behind me is going on at great length about Suge Knight and Jerry Heller, and how Suge Knight has done more to hurt black people than just about anyone else in history except maybe Jessie Jackson. I actually have a lot to say about the murders of Tupac and Biggie, but it's not possible to get a word in edgewise, and I eventually cease trying.

Eventually they start talking to one another again, and it comes up that they're cops with 4 straight days off. Suddenly everything makes complete sense. I hear beers crack in the backseat and don't care. At a pause in their conversation, I tell them that a friend gave me a switchblade, and ask if they're legal in Oregon.

Depends. Do I have it on me? Can they see?

They can.
It's legal. Single-edged, unconcealed blade, basically just a really nice pocket-knife with push-button convenience. Pretty much as I'd suspected, but it's good to have confirmation.

Unfortunately, the conversation until we get to La Center will now be about how I need, absolutely need to get a concealed carry license. I need to get a handgun and carry it with me at all times. But if I ever brandish it, I need to use it.

The 'Pac and Biggie guy is harping on what a dangerous job I have, he wouldn't do it without a gun. His Irish friend is talking simultaneously, and loudly, about how the real reason I need a concealed carry is that the second Amendment will be taken away any day now, and that when it happens, the license will be valuable. The causes his friend to talk even more loudly about how it's really about safety, and between that and the stereo they had me crank it up, it's a very loud scene as we take the off-ramp.

I have two drunk off-duty cops yelling at me about how I need to get a gun. This is extremely amusing to me, even ludicrous when considering the attitude policemen have had toward me for the vast majority of my life, but I keep my delight private.

They interrupt the "Crabbie needs to get a gun" chorus long enough to tell me to slow down, La Center cops are dicks. They then pick it up again, and it's still going on even after I drop them in the casino lot and the Suge Knight fan has handed me a C note.

They seem like nice guys, and if they weren't so drunk, I'd really enjoy going into the casino, getting a free coke or two, and playing blackjack with them. But they're too loud and obnoxious, and I don't want to be placed in the position of having to explain them.

As I pull off, the Kraut is in a four-point defensive lineman's stance, ready to launch himself across the asphalt at his Irish friend. I get out of there as quickly as possible.

Catching the Scent

2006-09-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

Before I get to Thursday night's hijinx, I'm going to cover Saturday night's. Because Saturday was, like, more recent, I guess. I'll issue a warning right now, this post is going to be extremely gross. Please don't read it if you're squeamish, or offended by less savory aspects of human biology.

I'm actually going to start off with my ride home on Friday morning. I had a day guy - tall, middle-aged, red-headed lease driver. He'd driven me a couple of times before, and is a really nice guy. We were talking about the advantages of driving nights vs. days, and he told me about an experience of his while working nights in Bend.

He got a call to pick up at a restaurant/bar, and the guy was so drunk that the doorman had to help him out. He got in the cab, and smelled like shit. Literally, the man smelled like feces. He only wanted to go three blocks, to his car. He'd actually taken the cab so that he could drive - people would see him leaving in the cab, and not think he was going to drive drunk. Pissed off, my driver let him out. He drove another couple of blocks, and the smell was still there, so he looked in the back seat. It was smeared with human excrement.

Disgusted, he drove back to the bar, furious that they'd put the guy in his cab in such a state. He pulled up, and noticed that there was a trail of diarrhea leading from the inside of the restaurant to the curb. Transfixed, he followed the trail back inside, and was able to find the seat the guy'd been sitting in (which was very, very nasty). The people working there hadn't noticed, hell, people had been walking in the shit and tracking it all over the place.

I say that to say this: Saturday night I had the most foul smelling human being I've ever encountered in my life. I mean it's hard for me to describe, it was so foul. Imagine an obese woman in her mid-60s who didn't bathe, had a deep-rooted and untreated yeast infection, and had a fondness for rotten egg perfume. That's a pretty good characterization of her.

I picked this poor soul up around 29th & Clinton, she was headed to the subsidized housing downtown. I rolled all of the windows down, and just tried to get her there as fast as I could. This was so completely in character with the rest of my night that I was barely even angry, I just wanted to get her the fuck out of my cab.

I got her to where she was going, and she said that she had to go inside to get the money. I waited a few minutes, after which she came out to tell me that she'd thought she had the money inside, but in fact didn't. I informed her that she was never to do that again, and did little to mask my brimming level of disgust and frustration. She offered her cane in lieu of fare, which I declined, and made me even more disgusted.

She then offered her coat, which I accepted. My reasoning was that as someone who is essentially a bag lady, her coat was perhaps valuable enough for her to claim, and that the weather on Sunday was going to be in the low 80s and sunny, so I wouldn't be endangering her health. I threw it in the trunk, and drove off, desperate to make some money. I also called dispatch, and told them to put her on the no cabs list.

The smell, of course, persisted. I rolled all the windows down, sprayed some air freshener, etc., but nothing helped it. Finally, on my way to pick up a $70 airporter that my saint of a dispatcher threw me in pity, it occurred to me to check whether or not the smell was getting from the jacket in the trunk into the cab proper. I pulled over at a 7-11, popped the trunk, and almost threw up. As I was about as far from the garage as possible, I also threw the jacket away.

When I got back in, I sat down to write out a report for the superintendents, explaining why I'd committed a gross violation of company policy in throwing away something I'd received in trust. This led to a sudden sense of great amusement at the situations my job sometimes forces me to have to explain in writing, so I was laughing as I wrote. My driver from Friday morning was coming in to pick up his cab, and asked me what was up. As I began the story, and was at the point where I was describing the old woman's lingering scent, the other driver interrupted me with a startled, bug-eyed look on his face and said, "It was shit, wasn't it?" - like shit had been stalking him all of his life, and just now re-appeared from the shadows to claim another victim.

This of course got me to laughing even harder.

After finishing up the report and smoking a cigarette, I was delighted to see that G would be my driver home. G's a Safety Board member, and a Greek immigrant who's been driving cab since before I was born. He's the kind of salty, incredibly vulgar (yet somehow oddly endearing, perhaps due to the accent) character who drives cabs in hard-boiled detective novels.

Anyway, I start to tell G my story, and after about a sentence or two, he interjects with disgust and some excitement, "it was the poosie, she has the stanky poosie!"

I told G that yes, the smell was so yeasty and she was so sober that it was a distinct possibility. I went on to finish the story, with G energetically agreeing with my actions, which made me feel better. When I was done, he went on to tell me a story about the woman "with the stankiest poosie in the whole world, I shit you not my friend," how her pussy was so stank that they wouldn't let her into her regular bars anymore, and that G once had to drive her from 21st & Burnside on the west side out to 169th & Halsey.

"And the whole way there and back, I am thinking to myself, 'G you ugly dick motherfucker, you will never take an old woman with stanky pussy again. I can also not get the smell to leave for hours"

Anyway, it was both fun and appalling to hear an old Greek man say "stanky pussy" about 50 times, and discourse on his theories of feminine hygiene. He was obviously very excited that he had someonewith him who also knew how horrible certain types of old lady smell can be.

"This is the thing," G says to me, "these people, they have no fucking idea the assholes we deal with. They might think they fucking know, they might watch these fucking idiot shows they fucking watch, but these people do not know what it is to be in car with the stankiest pussy in history of the fucking world.

"Man, I just hope that [my two superintendets] understand."

"They will understand Crabbie. And if they don't understand and give you hard time, tell them to come fucking talking to me. I will explain to them. I will explain about the stanky pussy and how bad it is."

So there you go, I'm back on the streets. This was taped to the dashboard of my new regular cab on Saturday nights:
Cops, etc. story in the next day or two.

Chasing the Trane

2006-09-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

Last night was almost completely unremarkable in terms of making money. Honestly, it just straight up sucked for a Friday. Thankfully I made Friday money on Thursday night, so it all comes out in the wash.

It's only gotten tangential reference here before, but the radio plays a very large role in my work experience. It's my only steady companion - the cab actually has a customer in it only maybe half of the time, on a good night, and often times they aren't all that talkative. So I love my public and community radio stations, and Portland is blessed with one very good one (KMHD, 89.1 - jazz, and blues on Friday night) and two extraordinary ones (OPB, 91.5 - NPR and local programming, music for a few hours at night & KBOO, 90.7, community radio with music at night). I have all three of their nighttime schedules pretty well memorized at this point. I give pretty generously to OPB & KBOO, as they both make my working life drastically more enjoyable.

KBOO, especially, I love to death. And tonight reminded me why. I started off listening to KMHD's blues programming, which typically carries me through Friday nights given lackluster offerings by KBOO & OPB. Around 11, though, I'd heard just one too many a white woman with an unimaginative back-up band pretending to be Odetta, and thought I'd see what was cracking on KBOO.

What was cracking on KBOO was John Coltrane's 80th birthday party. All Coltrane, all the time, 'til 6 AM - no commercials.

I love Coltrane. Too many jazz fans, in my opinion, intimidate people and scare them off of the music. Their obsessive fetishization has created, in many people's minds, this mystique around the music that really pisses me off. These guys (and they're typically white guys) go on and on with their catalogues of sets and recording sessions and their over-lengthy discussion of composition and improvisation that potential listeners get scared off by this concept of jazz as very important, intellectual music that puny mortals can never hope to grasp. When I'm playing jazz in my car, everyone always tells me how much their father loves it, but that they just don't have the time to get to know it.

Fuck that shit. It's music, and you shouldn't have to study it and obsess over it to listen to and enjoy it.

I'm not trying to make music I love seem trivial, but I do feel like jazz needs to be de-mystified in order for it to remain what it was for most of its existence - a popularly produced and consumed music, not a distraction for intellectuals and elites.
Anyway, the guys at KBOO, god bless them, seem to have pretty much the same attitude (unlike KMHD, which just went ahead with blues). I love Coltrane. "Alabama" is one of the most movingly beautiful songs I've ever heard. "India" is some of the best psychedelic freakout music ever. And he covers the gap in between with amazing dexterity. And his sound - the thing about Coltrane is that when you hear him once, you can always recognize him when you hear him again. Even the drunk-ass punk-rock band I picked up at 4 AM could peg him immediately. There simply never was (or will be) anybody who sounded like him.

I could go on and on about him, but doing so would probably only serve to play into the same mystification process that I decried earlier. I'll close by saying two things: he made what could have been a supremely annoying night delightful, and that he was, for my money, the most divinely inspired musical genius since Bach. Whether one is particularly spiritual or not, it's impossible to listen to Coltrane, or read his liner notes, and not be acutely aware of his sense of an engagement with the divine - of a relationship with a living, breathing, and immensely loving God that dwelled not in the clouds, but in music and people.

I love him for this, just as I absolutely love Mingus for his conjuring of "soul."

Okay, that's enough out of me. The point is that cabbies listen to the radio a lot. Tomorrow or the day after, I'll tell the story of what happened Thursday night. Just so you know that I'm not getting soft or too boring: it involved the police, the switchblade, hip-hop, open containers, and a casino.

Recruitment

2006-09-13T03:52:00.000-07:00

It's so much easier to flag a cab here. I love it. After getting some pho, I just step outside, engage in some controlled cigarette smoking with the ex-marine (we'll give him some more dignity and call him J), and stick my hand out when I see a cab. Perfect.

I basically have the same interaction with G, my driver, as I've had with every other cabbie since I've been in town. How's it going? I drive one of these down in Portland. Talk about money, both going out and coming in. Mutual amazement/disgust with Seattle medallion prices. Discussion of how my company works. Seattle driver is impressed. We arrive at my destination, and I tip 50%.

Except... G is very excited to hear about the cab business in Portland. His best friend had been a cab driver in SeaTac, but is now a pastor in Portland. This friend has always told G that if the business is good in Portland, he should move down there. And now some white kid in the back of G's cab is telling him that the cab business in Portland is, in fact, a little bit better than in Seattle. Not only that, but that it's easier to buy one, and that at one company there are several other significant perks. Besides, Portland is a smaller city and there's not as much crime.

G is now very excited. He'd thought about moving before, but he hadn't wanted to. He's spent nine, ten years getting to know Seattle, "What for to move?" he asks. But now he's hearing about a pretty good deal, and asking me about housing prices. How much to buy a three bedroom? I'm clueless in this regard, but say that he could probably get something in a decent neighborhood, not too fancy, in the mid 200s. This sounds about right to me, given conversations I've had with others, but it isn't based on anything empirical.

"What do you think, should I move down to Portland?"

Suddenly I'm feeling a little sheepish. I do not feel in any way qualified to be telling East African immigrants, who apparently have families, about major career/life decisions. I'm trying to remember if the East African community in Portland is mostly Amharic or Tigrean, Ethiopian or Eritrean, etc. I'm not remembering, and I have no clue where G falls into all of that. I have no clue whether my superintendent would hire him - on the one hand he has plenty of experience and knows how to use our dispatch system, on the other his English is very heavily accented and not quite fluent. We have immigrant drivers, but all are easily intelligible and conversant in English, and the super turns away about 10 drivers for every one he hires.

"I think you should come down and check it out before you make any major decisions," I tell him. I explain to him that my company is pretty much the only one he'd want to work for - maybe our largest competitor, but that he probably would be making a little less money as a lease driver with the competitor than he is now, and that I don't know if ownership there is as good a deal. He'd also be making less as he learned the city, though I explain to him that Portland is much easier to learn than Seattle given the fact that it was actually well-planned and that the roads form a grid.

He asks for my card, and I give it to him. He's a little taken aback by my card's... unusual graphic design, but still smiles as we shake hands. I tell him to call me any time if he has questions. Part of me's excited for him to call and for me to help an immigrant take a step up the ladder, another part's scared that he will, and end up moving down to Portland and somehow getting screwed.

My Man

2006-09-12T04:10:00.000-07:00

I took another Seattle cab on Sunday, and finally met what appears to be my Seattle equivalent. Young guy, East African, makes exactly as much as I do, listens to dancehall while driving because it's the only good thing on the radio. He kept calling me "my man," which I found kind of creepy as the combination of the phrase and his accent served to remind me a great deal of the Iraqi interrogator in Three Kings. Up here they pay their lease by the week (like most companies). His brother owns the cab he drives, so he only pays $380, but most people pay $405. He was impressed that I make as much as him while paying a higher lease, and by the freedom I have of not having to pay for a full week.

I'm really enjoying being on vacation. The more I think about it, the less excited I am about buying a cab. Is this really a business I want to commit to? I basically want to work at it for a year and save up enough money to finish my degree, and then have it as a part time gig while I'm in school. Of course taking a week and a half off to cruise up to Seattle and spend hundreds of dollars on music and omelets isn't bringing me any nearer to that goal.

I also had a cab driving dream last night. The dream was that I was up here, except that I was also driving a cab up here to help pay for the trip. It was really nerve-wracking for me, because Seattle is laid out in a really absurd way and it's not a town I know very well. I kept getting my fares lost, but I'd be cool about it and knock money off the meter, and they weren't getting too worked up about it. I had one group of people - two men in the back, and a woman up front. I was faking my way through it, but took a wrong turn and had to turn back around. The woman was very beautiful, and pressed up against me. She held my hand as I reached to shift gears (the cab was a stick, which makes very little sense). I felt a great sense of comfort and arousal, and she was starting to caress me right when my friend woke me up to fix him some tuna.

Not a whole heck of a lot else to report. I've met some great people. I've been listening to a lot of the music I bought over the weekend (10 CDs!), and really loving that. Speaking of which, I've added a link to Soriah's site (the logic being that he's another cab driver). I also added links to Through a Windshield, Darkly (a cabbie in some cow town down south who writes a blog I like a lot), and The Blanktop Diaries, which is a hilarious blog by a call-taker (NOT a dispatcher, they're two very different things) in Northern Virginia.

Tool of the Trade

2006-09-10T04:57:00.000-07:00

I've taken cabs here in Seattle each of the past two nights. Good guys both times - in each instance they knew I was from out of town and didn't drive me around. The guy tonight even took an effective and not very obvious shortcut to avoid baseball game traffic, even though it was a short trip. Talking shop with both of them, they were pretty amazed by how much on it my company is compared to theirs. Both drove for the largest cab company in Seattle (imaginatively enough, it's called "Yellow Cab"), and despite being in a bigger city and paying lower leases, make significantly less than I do.

And I don't even have a family to support back in South Asia.

That's really about it so far as Seattle cab insights go - when I end up riding in a cab by myself, the driver end I always end up just talking business, and that hasn't changed now that I'm out of town. No war stories, just money. The guys up here use the same MDT as we do, but the "soon-to-clear" function seems to have either been disabled, or isn't that important, or I've had dumb drivers.

Today a good friend of mine gave me a really nice switchblade. I'd post a picture, but didn't bring the USB phone to computer connector, so you'll have to wait. I was actually pretty psyched at first, as I'd been thinking/planning on getting a knife to have around for work. Now that I do have one, the whole idea has become apparent in all its macho boyishness - if there's ever a situation where the knife would maybe come in handy, it'll also likely be a situation where the other guy already has the drop on me anyway. It's like a gun - how would introducing a knife into the situation improve things at all?

Coincidentally, from our window at the 13 Coins while eating a 3 AM meal (would you call it breakfast?), my friends and I saw two extremely drunk kids who'd just stabbed a guy get the shit beat out of them. Well, not literally, but there was literal ass-kicking involved. And heads getting slammed against cars, etc. Believe me, these two kids got fucked up . Stumbled off with blood just pouring down their faces. Then we got to watch the guy who'd been stabbed bleed all over the place and get carted off by the paramedics. The sidewalk outside was just covered in three different people's blood.

Once outside and surveying the damage, I found my reaction instructive. My first reaction was to notice the very displeased looking Nigerian janitor leaning against the wall, and to feel an instant empathy for him. The second thought was that if I ever got stabbed, very few of my friends would react by immediately unleashing a furious and effective beat-down on the perpetrators. They'd certainly be helpful in terms of calling the cops and tending to me, but they wouldn't start slamming heads into doors and leaving the victims looking like the cover of an Andrew W.K. album. Which is kind of a shame, it would probably be useful to have some friends who can crack skulls when the situation calls for it. The sad fact of the matter is that I'm probably the hardest cat I hang with, and that's not an attempt to suggest that I'm some bad-ass. My ex-marine pal up here in Seattle definitely has my back in a fisticuffs kind of way, but my experimental musician friends in Portland? Not so much.

Also tonight at the pfestival I got to see a set by Soriah (above), who's an amazing singer, friend, fellow cab driver, and just plain hell of a nice guy. I'll be on his next album, which is both exciting for me and something I feel safe in divulging given that there are a number of other collaborators on there. Buy it when it drops, supposedly early winter of '07. I'll post a link when I'm in a wi-fi zone I can use and actually have my computer on me.

On the Road

2006-09-08T04:04:00.000-07:00

I'm coming at you live from exotic Seattle, where I'm attending the Wooden Octopus Skull Experimental Musick Pfestival and having to use a friend's computer that doesn't seem to allow all of Blogger's idiotproof tools for the HTML retarded (like me).

So you're just going to have to google shit if you want links or whatever.

Tonight, after a wonderful 12:30 AM at the 13 Coins (one of my favorite restaurants in the country), I tried to strike up a dialogue with one of my cab-driving comrades in arms parked outside.

Suffice it to say that I now completely understand why some of my customers are so thrilled that I speak somewhat fluent English. What homeboy and I had ourselves there was a failure of communication, not a conversation. I'm not at all trying to come off on an anti-immigrant tip - anyone who can recognize an address and drive a car safely is a perfectly competent cab driver. But many people seem to expect a conversation as part of the package, and that's pretty difficult to do with someone who can barely discuss the rudiments of his business with someone else in the same field.

About the only thing I did manage to find out from him is that a medallion is now up to 185 grand in Seattle. Fuck that shit. Just another reminder of why I don't think I'd drive cab for any other company in any other city. The deal I have is so sweet for this business that it's important to stay grateful for it.

Another thing I've been thinking about is what this blog should be, content-wise. It was conceived of strictly as a way for my friends and family to read about all those "crazy taxi stories" they were sure I'd have. As those people don't really seem to comprise a significant portion of the readership, what are those who read the site interested in?

At least one person has mentioned a desire to learn more about the mechanics and behind-the-scenes type stuff of the job. Are others interested in restaurant/location reviews? Social criticism and societal trend type stuff? I don't have a proper digital camera, so that's basically out for now. I'm just throwing out ideas, here. I like the idea of just sticking to stories, but haven't really been doing so for a while, due to both a lack of good recent ones and funneling many of the better ones in other directions. I feel like I should both keep the blog updated semi-regularly and its entries semi-interesting, which is why I think I've ended up doing more editorializing in the past few updates, as the material itself seems so boring.

Let me know what you think.

Good to Go

2006-09-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I got a call to pick up at one of the supposedly trendy, yet incredibly antiseptic, townhouses that have started to sprout up in inner Northeast between Fremont and 84 and Williams and 20th. Out of this one spilled five very drunk people: two white men in their late middle-ages, two white women of a similar age, and an Asian woman in her mid-30s. They were all dressed very well (actually half of them weren't dressed very well, they were just dressed expensively).

All five of them piled into the cab and immediately started screeching and shouting and laughing very loudly. After a minute or so of this, the din briefly subsided enough so that I could ask them where they were going, a question that seemed to surprise them Northrup Station, an architectural disaster of a boutique hotel in Northwest Portland. Very pricy and very tasteless, it really was obvious enough that I shouldn't have had to ask.

They contiuned carrying on very loudly and in high pitches, some conversation about the mini-social controvery surrounding one woman at the party turning down a piece of cake offered her at the party, and how that piece of cake was turned down, and did you see her face, etc. I was driving down Broadway to cross the bridge, very much looking forward to the trip's impending end.

A camera flash went off in the car.

"Please don't do that again," I said. This made no dent - the conversation continued, and I obviously hadn't been heard. Much giggling and screeching from the women in the back.

"I said, do NOT use the flash again in this cab. Is that clear?" More loudly this time, very much in my "stern parent" voice. This at least drew their attention to the fact that I'd said something, and that this something was not said in a proper tone for the help to use.

"Ex-cuse me?" asked the Asian woman, "I didn't quite get that."

"If you fire that flash off one more time, I'm kicking all of you out of the cab."

"What?"

"Take another picture and you're walking."

Dead silence. The gruff, take-no-shit disciplinarian stance is almost always effective at getting drunks' attention and cowing them into sheepish good behavior. The only time it's ever really failed me was with the guy who wanted to fight me.

These folks, however, were obviously not accustomed to being treated like, well, the obnoxious drunks they were. After a twenty seconds or so, the Asian woman finally retorted with "Well, you could have been more polite." I'm horrible at coming up with snappy retorts on the spot (though, like most, excellent in hindsight), and didn't feel the need to explain myself to her, so I stayed silent. Eventually the conversation and screeching in the back started up again, though at a slightly lower volume.

When we arrived at the hotel, I quoted them the $13 dollar fare. One of the middle-aged white women handed me a ten and a five, and they all got out of the cab. Still annoyed with them, I asked if she wanted her change back. One of the men, a skinny little guy with a mustache who seemed to be with the Asian woman snapped "yes," so I gave him back two ones. As he was closing the door, he sneered "and you need to learn some manners."

"And you need to grow a brain," I mumbled, and put the car in reverse. Despite my lack of ability with on the spot comebacks, I'm also almost utterly incapable of allowing anyone else to have the last word.

"What did you say?" screeched the Asian woman, sticking her furious face in the window.

"I said that you need to grow a brain." (it's worth noting that throughout the following conversation I'm speaking in an even and measured tone, the "Dad's so mad that he isn't even acting outwardly mad" approach that my father used to great effect in my youth)

"I never!"

"You know that we have your cab number and can call you in," snapped the man.

"That's great, it's cab number XXX. You guys just need to accept that you were being idiots and incredibly unsafe, you have no basis for getting so worked out."

"You need to be more polite!" the woman, again.

"Do you have any idea how insanely dumb that camera stunt was, or how insane you're acting right now?"

"Insane, you think I'm insane? Well I think you're a little boy."

This was feeble enough that I was able to pull out of the hotel without further comment. I told the dispatcher that she'd probably be getting a complaint about me, and what had happened. I will get in absolutely no trouble for this incident, no one will blame me for being displeased with drunk people firing off a flash in the car.

Still, it ate at me for a couple of hours. I kept thinking of all of the ways I could've tried to make myself clearer to them: "Look, you wouldn't be polite to me if I came in and started flashing lights in your eyes and screeching like a wounded raccoon at your job masturbating horses, right?" etc. The main thing that got under my skin about it is that I tend to be incredibly polite with people who aren't being complete dicks.

Last night, for example, I also had an extremely drunk woman who kept talking to herself, didn't give me an address, wanted me to cut her a deal, gave me three different sets of directions, and was basically in a state of alcohol-induced psychosis. I was extremely polite to her, and got her where she was going without running up the meter. She asked for my card at the end of the trip (I told her I didn't have one) Same with another guy who was so drunk his speech was just one continuous slur that lasted the whole trip as he constantly gave me directions on a very easy and obvious route that anyone living in Portland would know, then didn't have enough cash to pay so he had to go inside to get more. I was really nice to him, and got him home safe, and he gave me a hug at the end. Now another guy's springing to mind who I couldn't stand, but was so polite to that he gave me a $10 tip on a $12 trip. And he lived in a dump. Three incredibly aggravating customers, and they got the whole "sir/ma'am", patient and understanding treatment.

Why?

Because they weren't being grossly obnoxious and inconsiderate. They were annoying, they were drunk, and they didn't have their shit together at all, but they were still as polite and reasonable as possible, and in both cases even apologetic for being so drunk.

And it's not that I've got something against rich people or don't know how to interact with them, either. It's not at all infrequent for me to take wealthier customers to the airport early in the morning - I often like them, and they often like me a great deal. I'm fully capable of being charming, polite, and full of pleasent conversation. Hell, with all of the opportunities I was given at various fancy colleges and prep schools before I drank myself out of them (I initially ended up in Portland to attend Reed), I'm a lot more accustomed to dealing with the rich and "cultured" than I'd probably like to admit. The main thing I've learned is that rich people are just like everyone else: most of them are perfectly pleasent, and some of them are self-absorbed jerks.

I don't know why these assholes bothered me so much. Probably for the same reason I hated Reed and the fancy New England boarding school - the self-absorbed jerks that are rich bother me because they have their money to fall back on as evidence to themselves that they're superior to me. I'd always been able to put bullies "in their place" until I got exposed to the privileged jerks, who seem to possess a special and unshakable awareness of their own exceptionalism that I'm probably jealous of.

Well that's enough semi-public self-psychoanalysis for the morning. In other news, I'm going on vacation for two weeks starting today. I'm taking the laptop with me, and will try to keep this updated with selections from my arsenal of older stories.

Also, this morning while cashing out my charge slips, I had to pay $78 and change to cover my "accident." I guess the lady liked the idea of getting some free detail work done, and thus my righteous indignation over my interaction with the Safety Board is a lot less warranted, as I cost the company about $375 (minus my $78, so $297). It wasn't that big a deal, although now that I think about it, it's kind of bizarre to be taking in enough money now that I'm shrugging off unexpected losses that large.

Which reminds me: this guy did, in fact, promptly come in to claim his T.V. and pay his money the Monday after the incident, which makes him a fucking champ in my book.

Vasoline Alley welcomes a tourist

2006-09-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Friday night was hot fire.

Due to locking my keys in the car, again*, taking a shower, and going to a meeting, I only worked about seven hours. Business was kind of slow for a Friday night, to boot.

And I still made as much as I do when I bang out the whole shift on a weeknight.

I try not to talk too much about the mechanics of my job, as I understand that it's not very interestirng (and the specifics unintelligible to someone who doesn't work for my company, or at least know its zone map). This blog is supposed to be about telling specific stories about my interactions with my customers. Still, Friday night was one of those nights where I was just at the peak of my game, and the feeling of being in a zone like that is terrific. I talk way too much about how good I am at my job, and that's both boring and self-indulgent.

But...

The nights where I'm making all the right decisions with the MDT, making my fares laugh, and picking the right routes, where everything's just falling into place perfectly and the money's rolling in at a great hourly clip while I know other drivers are sitting on their asses - those are the nights where I'm just absolutely in love with having a job that can be so much FUN. It's why I still drive a cab, and thus why you occasionally get to read sleazy stories about fisting.

Not that much interesting happened in the way of conversation or passenger behavior. I had one young couple that were apparently in the carpentry-for-hipster-bars business. They spoke incessantly about the bars they'd made and were making, using completely incomprehensible jargon. My complete bewilderment and disinterest in their conversation is why I resist talking about "soon-to-clearing," "temp offing," bidding, when to accept trips from adjacent zones, when to start and turn off the meter, etc. It's endlessly fascinating to people who know and care about such things, and very much not so for those who don't.

The other somewhat interesting passenger was pretty hilarious. I dropped off a guy who'd just gotten off his swing-shift job at the Roxy, a 24-hour diner downtown on Stark. Across the street is Jake's Crawfish, a restaurant/bar that's very popular with tourists and people with relatives in from out of town (I've honestly never picked up a party solely comprised of locals at this place, nor has anyone I've thought to ask).

Almost all of the other businesses for three blocks are gay bars or bathhouses. This section of the street's nickname is "Vasoline Alley."

While filling out my trip sheet, I was anxiously flagged by a white man in his mid-to-late fifties. He was wearing a t-shirt that said "HOMELAND SECURITY IS A GUN IN MY HANDS." Instead of being a solid color, the letters were comprised of red, white, and blue stripes. The guy also had a significant pot belly, a Wilfred Brimley white mustache, glasses, and a baseball cap with a bald eagle's profile on it.

He ran to get in the cab, and told me to take him to Jubitz, a massive truck stop out on Marine Drive. He was really drunk, and the whole way there he kept talking about how "I ain't never seen nothing like it." I kept trying to coax out what exactly he'd seen, but all he kept saying was "I ain't seen nothing like it. Not in Vegas, not in New York. The, the... they were young people! Young people, and they were just walking about out in the open, like, like..." then he'd just kind of trail off into a stupor. He was an airplane mechanic down from Alaska, and he continued to be loudly adamant that he had never, ever seen anything like Vasoline Alley. "This city is a strange place, a very strange place," was the other thing he kept repeating. When he got out, he told me that I should leave town as soon as I could, that's what he was doing.

I wasn't able to get the details out of him, but instead spent the rest of the night having great fun (occasionally with passengers) making up stories about what, exactly, the Homeland Security agent from Alaska had stumbled into that night.

I worked last night (Sunday), and would love to do some gloating about how much money I made, but it can get tiring to pat yourself on the back so much. There was a fun encounter that I'll relay some other time. For now, I need to sleep, as I'm probably working tonight, too.

*For those of you wondering how a fuck-up who manages to lock his keys in the cab twice in the space of about a month and a half still has this job, the answer is sex. Lots and lots of sex. My prohibition on sleeping with customers does not extend to my hottie of a two hundred and seventy-five pound, sixty year-old weekend superintendent.

That Makes Sense

2006-09-01T05:52:00.001-07:00

Passenger: "So, like, where do you pee?"

Crabbie: "Trees and gas stations, mostly."

(pause)

P: "Yeah, I guess that makes sense."

(pause)

P: "There are a lot of trees around here."

C: "Yup, lot of trees in Oregon"

I wasn't lying when I said that work's been boring recently. Well, this job is so over-stimulating that it's never boring, especially given that my income is dependent on my level of activity, but I just haven't had much in the way of thrilling interactions or conversations.

I drove a drunk rich girl home who was really upset and emotional about her "best guy friend" calling her a cunt. In doing so, I got to take a back way up to Council Crest, so that was neat.

I also did a fair amount of work out in the western suburbs, which is also interesting to me, as it's a place I don't know very well. I'm starting to learn them, but I find both the lack of a grid and the people who live there to be annoying. Not obnoxious or particularly aggravating, just... suburban. I'm an inveterate city boy, I suppose.

So yeah, good times. I think I'm going to work tonight (Friday), so maybe some crazy blog-worthy shit will go down.

Sexy Beast

2006-08-31T07:47:00.000-07:00

This isn't really a story per se, but touches on something that someone named "Shroudman" left in the comments for the previous post, and gets into the "what is it like, in a general sense, for Crabbie to drive a cab," side of things, which usually gets only tangential notice.

I don't hit on fares. I even avoid flirting with them as much as possible, especially the ones that I'm attracted to.

This probably doesn't seem like the brightest idea, as I'm young, single, and relatively good-looking. There's also the matter of my having a job (driving a cab nights), and an important aspect of my lifestyle (recovering alcoholic) that don't tend to lend themselves very well to meeting sexy young thangs. I'll admit to having moments where I feel like I'm wasting the youth, looks, and sexual prime, and that I'm going to one day wake-up as one of the dirty old men who hang around the garage and talk about how they like to work downtown so that they can look at the girls.

So why on earth would I adopt a pretty strict non-fraternization policy when roughly a quarter of my customers seem to be, well, exactly the single young women in my age group that I so rarely meet in my off-duty life?

The main reason is courtesy. My last semi-serious girlfriend was a stripper who had horror stories about creepy cab drivers who would hit on her and her co-workers, or try and demand private "shows" in lieu of fare, etc. I've always been pretty determined not to be one of those guys.

Even putting strippers aside, I tend to figure that a young woman who's getting a ride to or from the bar is calling a cab for one reason... she needs someone to drive her someplace. Now, this might just be me talking crazy (as some other drivers don't seem to be of the same opinion) but very few people order a cab because they're looking to spark a romance. They just want to be taken to another location in the surrounding area. The chances are very high that they won't even notice the driver, and very likely won't remember him if they see him again. I don't want or expect the grocery clerk to hit on me, and I imagine that my fares have the same attitude towards me.

Finally, a young woman who's coming home alone from a bar has very likely just spent the last few hours having drunk men hit on her - it strikes me that she deserves to end the night with a couple of funny comments and/or a safe ride listening to good music, not one last chump taking a shot in the dark.

But that being the case, there are women who flirt with me. Cases where, were I not working, I would happily participate. I don't, though. One concern is liability - I'm not a very suspicious person (probably not suspicious enough, given my job), but there have been cab drivers, at my company, arrested on suspicion of rape and/or harrasment (to allay customer fears, this hasn't happened in years, and is a very rare occurence). Some of these allegations were undoubtedly true, or rooted in fact, but many also seem to have been instances of a drunk woman waking up and realizing what she'd done, or almost done, or considered doing (with a cab driver, of all people) and seeing the enormous potential for unscrupulous litigation. The best way for me to avoid this is by dropping a blanket stance of non-flirtation, and allowing the security camera to document my not leaving the cab with the woman in question.

There's also the important matter of my having NO GAME whatsoever.

But still, there's the occasional woman that I really hit it off with. We have a fantastic and engaging conversation about some non-flirtatious subject, and obviously enjoy each other's company a great deal. We could be great friends, or lovers.

Then one of two things typically happen: she gets out to meet her boyfriend, or begins to tell me about her job as a prostitute.

If for some reason neither of those things happen, I will almost definitely forget to give her my card (asking for a phone number seems a bit forward, given the whole customer/service worker thing, but providing mine seems like an effective enough way of displaying interest).

And if, by some miracles of miracles, I remember to give her my card, she will never call or email me. Best case scenario: I'll write my address on the back of the card when she asks for it, and three weeks later get a postcard from Los Angeles with no contact information.

Why?

Because, despite all of my considerable awesomeness, who in their right mind would want to date a cabbie?

Back in Effect

2006-08-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm still alive.

I apologize for not keeping this updated. There's been a confluence of circumstances that have kept me from writing this: I haven't been working as much, and I've been devoting my very limited reservoirs of "writing about cab driving" energy in another direction that could potentially bear more fruit in terms of money and prestige than this miniscule corner of the internet.

Let's be honest: this has always been a pretty half-assed little affair.

But the main reason I haven't been writing is that work's been mighty boring recently. This is largely by design, and something that I greatly prefer. I've been working steady parts of town where I know that I'll just be carting around nice, boring people, and I've been loving of it. None of the madness of the outer east side or deep north Portland. Just a bunch of boring-ass hipsters with nothing to say or terribly interesting to do. It's been a nice break.

I promise to try and get back on the beam, though. I'll start adding shorter pieces that recount older events, etc. I'll be taking a somewhat extended vacation soon, after a few shorter ones this past month, but autumn will bring a more regular work schedule, more business, and the likelihood of my purchasing a cab of my own in the next month or two. So there's all of that to look forward to.

Oh, and comments are back on. Sorry, I hadn't realized they were off, I think another part of my non-posting was not getting any comments and feeling like people had lost interest. Yes, I'm a dumbass.

So that's the update. Now, to make up for lost time, I'll give you the one bit of sleaze that's cropped up in the past few weeks, even if secondhand. WARNING: This story veers away even from my usual "hard R" content into "XXX" territory.

So I got a call to pick up at Cocktails N' Dreams on Thursday night, a very sleazy strip club off of Powell that's notable for its Miami Vice-esque interior (this is not due to a sense of kitsch or irony) of pastels and neon, as well as the fact that occasionally someone gets murdered there. I hate picking up people there, as they tend to be drunk men who are unintelligent, uninteresting, going somewhere close-by, and poor tippers.

This call was for a dancer, who was going maybe 14 blocks away. She was attractive, in a tattooed and pierced sort of way (which is not typically my sort of way), and began hitting on me from the moment I walked into the club to tell her I was there. When she got in the cab, she told me about how happy she was to get out of there, that everyone was so sleazy and the music was so terrible, and here I was the first hot guy she'd seen all night and I was even listening to good music in the cab.

I ignored the latter bits, and made a joking comment about how shocking it was that there was bad music and sleazy people in Cocktails N' Dreams.

This led to an animated and brief conversation about sleaze in our respective professions, and her dropping this gem on me:

She also works at Cabaret (essentially downtown's version of Cocktails N' Dreams, I've never been inside, largely due to the strikingly similar exterior color schemes). While at work one night, she looked over at a girl giving a man a lapdance and was shocked, truly shocked, for one of the first times in a long time.

The other girl was getting fisted. Willingly and happily. In the middle of the club.

My passenger just sat and stared for a while, and then finely got the security guard. He initially didn't believe her, until she finally got him to come over and have a look for himself. He was similarly dumbfounded for a bit, and was too embarassed to interrupt the procedure, and waited until after the "dance" was over to remove the woman from the premises.

So there's a nice little vignette for you.

Release the Hound!

2006-08-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

On Friday night, I dropped a woman off at 4th & Everett on the westside, right in the middle of the nexus of clubs in what used to be Chinatown that I try to avoid. This is an area full of drunk and obnoxious people. As I ran her card, a drunk middle-aged white man with sandy blonde hair and a red Hawaiian shirt started asking through the window "Will you take us to Gateway? Will you take us to Gateway?" An obese middle-aged white guy with gray hair was standing behind them on the sidewalk. It was a decent fare, so I told them I'd take them after I was done processing the young woman's card.

They got in, and I got on 84 as they told me all about their big 20th high school reunion. The pudgy guy gave me an address in Clackamas County (not anywhere near Gateway, but a much better trip on the meter). I said sure. He promptly passed out, and started snoring very loudly. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt said that it was going to be very hard to wake the fat guy up, and that I should take them to his place in Gateway. I agreed to do so.

The conscious guy was very amicable, if extremely drunk. He kept telling me how much he loved the jazz we were listening to ("A Love Supreme" on KBOO), and that I seemed like such a nice guy. I got him to his place, and it was about $21 on the meter.

He gave me a debit card, which I ran. It was declined. This was completely confusing to him, proving to him that his card had in fact been declined was like proving to him that gravity didn't exist - his whole world was thrown into disarray.

He didn't have any cash. Did I take the Home Depot card? No. The Meier & Frank card? Sorry son, no dice. "Oh wait, here's one you can use!" He handed me the declined card again - I told him that it probably wasn't going to work any better this time. This routine continued for a good two or three minutes - he'd offer me store credit cards, I'd tell him we didn't take them, and then he'd find his bank card again and offer me that. I turned the meter back on.

Finally he said that he was going to go inside and get cash from his girlfriend. I was a little sketched out by this, but I figured that I had the fat guy for collateral. He then went around the back of the house, which made me more suspicious (suspicions of this not being his house, and him jumping a fence).

I waited - no guy, no lights coming on inside the house. I locked the fat guy in the cab, took my Maglite in hand, and walked around the back of the house. The back door was open, with a little kitchen light on inside. I walked around to the front and knocked - two or three dogs started barking, and I heard someone hushing them, but no answer. More knocking, more barking, but no guy. I tried to rouse the fat guy with various proddings, the flashlight, and a loud tone of voice, but no result whatsoever. I waited a minute or two more, knocked repeatedly at the house, and then called into dispatch.

"So I've got a fat guy passed out and snoring in the back of my cab, and he won't wake up when I tap, poke, or shake him. He had a friend, but the friend's skipped out on the fare. What do I do in this situation?"

(laughter over the radio)

"Wake up the fat guy?" the dispatcher suggests.

"I've shined a flashlight in his face and done everything but punch him in the nose, he's not waking up."

"Well, call the cops."

"On 911? This isn't exactly an emergency."

"Call 911, and tell them the situation."

I did, making it clear to the operator that the fat guy didn't seem to be in any obvious danger. I lit a cigarette, and figured that on a Friday night in this part of town, I was due for a wait. It's worth noting that I was actually in very good humor throughout all of this - I'd been having a good night both financially and personally, and could fully appreciate the absurdity of my situation, and how wonderful it is to have a job where I semi-routinely find myself in situations like this.

Within two minutes three cop cars (one of them a K-9 unit!) and an ambulance squeeled up. This made me even more amused, and I made some cracks about appreciating the support, but not being sure that the situation warranted such an expenditure of my tax dollars. The paramedics thus called off the firetruck that was en route. Apparently whenever there's a report of a suspect fleeing or hiding, the dog gets called.

Anyway, I told the cops what the story was, and the paramedics managed to rouse the fat guy pretty easily, I wish that I'd been paying attention to see what secret paramedic trick they used. The paramedics were really amused by the whole thing - it's hard to capture just how rediculous this guy was, or how drunk. Again, I forgot to employ the camera phone. While the cops knocked on the door and walked around the house, they tested the fat guy's blood sugar, and told him that everything seemed okay, he'd just have a hang-over in the morning. "Okay, good," he said, and promptly climbed back into the backseat and passed out again.

Meanwhile, the two beat cops hadn't found the other guy, so the K-9 guy asked eagerly if he could set the dog loose. This ellicited a big grin and a thumbs up from me, who at this point was mostly interested in seeing just how preposterous the situation could get. The other two cops nodded, and thus the German shephered was set loose.

The dog quickly found the man, who apparently had been squatted in a semi-fetal position in his backyard hedgerow. I was hanging out at the car and didn't get to see it happen, but the two regular cops ushered him out with big smiles on their faces. He didn't seem to understand what was going on or why, and they had to remind him about how he'd taken a cab and owed me money.

"Oh yeah, that's right!" he said. He was still in very good (if confused) humor, and totally amicable. We then went (for the fourth time) through the routine of him offering me the declined debit card, then his store credit cards, this time with the police present. The fat guy was then woken up again, and gotten out of the cab. He didn't have any money either, and kept saying "but he said he would pay for it!" and the other dude kept saying "yeah, yeah, I've got this one."

He then offered me his bank card again, and the cops and I burst out in laughter. The absurdity of their position then seemed to dawn on the two drunk guys, who also started smiling and laughing, and suddenly I felt like I was on a sitcom.

Then the cops started explaining to the two guys about how they had to figure out a way to pay me, or they'd be spending the weekend in jail on theft charges. The two drunk guys didn't seem to grasp the seriousness of this completely and kept laughing, but my mood started to sour slightly as the thought of having to give a statement, deal with this down the road, etc. I tried to tune it out, and let the cops talk to them.

Did I take checks?

No. Certainly not in this situation.

It began to look like the cops really were going to take them to jail, so I suggested an alternative. They could give me something valuable, I would take it into the garage, and they could come down and pay at their leisure, and then receive the valuable back. There are actually company policies and laws surrounding the custody of valuables in lieu of fare, and though it's a pain in the ass for everyone, it does work. If the item isn't claimed in 90 days, then the driver gets to keep it.

The cop seemed very appreciative to have had this out supplied, and talked it up to the guy.

"That's perfect! I know just the thing!" he said excitedly, "You can take my dog!"

I laughed loudly. "I can't be taking your dog, yo. I'm working until seven in the morning, and it wouldn't be very happy at the garage." The cops, at this point, were not even giving the slightest pretense of straight faces.

"But you know I'll come and get my dog tomorrow if I give it to you!"

"Man, I certainly hope so, but I ain't taking the dog. How about like a T.V. or something?"

"You want my T.V.?" the look of horror on his face suggested that I'd just asked for his first-born.

"It's a good idea, sir," said the cop.

"Okay, I'll go get my T.V."

He did, and it made a good story to entertain the family on their way to the airport that was my next fare (I would, of course, catch a very rare 3 AM Saturday morning airporter on the same night I had a television taking up half of my trunk).

I didn't wake up in time to get a cab Saturday, so I have no idea whether or not the guy came in with his money to claim the television.

The Heat is On

2006-08-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

"Oh my God!" screams the drunk guy as he gets in the cab. "What is this?"

He is understandably confused and delighted to be greeted by the dulcet tones of The System's "Rock N' Roll Me Again."

"This," I tell him, "is the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack."

"No, this," he tells me as his equally drunk female friend gets in the cab, "is awesome!"

And he is correct. I was thrilled when I got a cab with a tape deck. While moving, I had uncovered the tape my old roommate had given me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. In the time between now and then, I'd dreamed of the night that I'd be able to listen to it in the cab. After getting the car tonight, I'd rushed home to pick it up and sprinted down the stairs to show my current roommate and his hot friend from out of town. They were doing nitrous in the basement, and in a perfect state to howl with appreciation.

I saved the tape as my ace-in-the-hole all night. The night had started off hot, but been dragged down by bad luck around 1 am. At 2 AM, I figured that the bar rush would be the perfect time to bump such classics as "New Attitude" by Patti La Belle and "The Heat is On" by Glenn Frey, but instead they'd fallen on the wasted ears of a urine sample and a smelly stoner who was possibly mentally disabled.

But these people, they understand. When the drunk man hollers at me to turn it up as we pull away from Mulligan's on Hawthorne, I do. I turn that shit up to 11. And then, as we make a right onto 39th, the moment I've been waiting all night for finally strikes. "Rock 'N Roll Me Again" fades away, there's a split-second of silence, and then the bassline from "Axel F" (the Beverly Hills Cop theme) kicks in.

Howls of delight from the back, and I floor it, everything about my night suddenly perfect again.

You have not lived until the Beverly Hills Cop theme is playing at extremely loud volumes while you take sharp turns at speed in a cop car, two people screaming "Fuck yeah!" in the back seat. You might think you have, but you are wrong. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have had this experience, and those who are dead without realizing it.

Trust me, for now I (and two lucky drunks) know.

Gone

2006-08-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

Yo, I'm going to be out of town for the next few days, just so you cats know I haven't fallen off the face of the earth or gotten fired or anything. I promise to be back and updating more frequently in about a week. I'm really looking forward to this mini-vacation.

"... and I ain't lying."

2006-08-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

I got a call around 1:30 AM to pick up at The Hidden East, at SE 52nd & Duke. One of many dive bars in zone 118 that caters to a clientele of hardcore older alcoholics who aren't going anywhere. The "extra remarks" on the order were "BAR'S CLOSING, HE'S OUTSIDE."

"Wonderful," I thought to myself.

I pulled up and the lights were off, the parking lot empty. I had my windows down, and heard someone yell "Hey!" I heard it again. I got out to look around, and still couldn't see anyone. Then the same voice - "Hold on! I'll be right there!" I looked over and saw a man in the shadows of the dumpster, urinating.

"Wonderful," I thought to myself, and got back in the cab.

After a minute or two, a man with white hair and wrinkled skin stumbled over to the car and got in. He asked me to take him to the Harmony Inn, another very fine drinking establishment, but also one that was at least far enough away to be worth my while.

As I drove, he asked me my name. I told him. He said his name was Charlie Brown, and that he'd killed more men than God himself. He was the second most decorated Indian in Oregon who fought in the Korean War. He'd blown up all kinds of people, but he hadn't been killed in Korea, and neither had any of his Marines. His Marines had loved him because he was good and he was lucky, and he'd given them all BARs.

The Marines as a branch hadn't loved him, though. He'd wanted to go back, to fight in Vietnam, but they'd told him he was an asshole and wouldn't take him back.

"That's what they told me!" he said. "We won't take you, Charlie, you're too big an asshole! And I ain't lying!"

"Did you ask to go to Iraq?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"Well did you go back and ask to go to Iraq? I mean by now they've probably forgotten you're such an asshole."

This got a big laugh out of him, and an "I like you kid, you're alright." He then got serious. "They didn't let me go to Vietnam. They didn't let me go to Vietnam and a lot of people died. 5,000, no, 500,000 people died. They didn't know what they were doing. And what would it've done if I'd gone over there, too? If they had let me? Just another one dead."

He continued. "It's the same way now over there in Iraq. Except not as many kids die, so you don't hear as much about it. No, now they're so good at medicine the kids don't die, what would've killed on of my men you're stuck living with now. Double, triple, quadruple amputees. It's sick. You know how many wounded we've had? And 'wounded' is worse than it what it used to be. Fuck the dead, the dead get the good deal of it these days. The wounded numbers is what tell you how bad it really is."

I already knew all of this, but didn't tell him.

"This Bush," he said. "This Bush is the worst. Worse than Johnson, worse than Nixon, just a fucking spoiled, evil piece of shit. I hate 'im more than anything. And I'm a killer, I've killed so many people. And this Bush I hate more than anyone I killed. It's bad. It's real bad over there in Iraq.

Ah, listen to me. Just a drunk old man. It was 50, 60 years ago, but I killed a lot of people kid, and I ain't lying. I was 18 when I started and I'm 72 now, but I can remember."

And I didn't doubt him.

It came to $11 on the meter, and he tipped me a buck. As he got out of the car, he said "It's bad over there, real bad in Iraq, and I ain't lying. What's your name?"

I told him for the third time, and extended my hand for him to shake. Instead of shaking it, he clasped it weakly over the top, the way my grandmother used to hold my hand.

"Good to meet you, Crabbie," he said, "My name's Charlie Brown, and I'm the second most decorated Indian from the Korean War in Oregon."

He started to withdraw his hand, but then grabbed mine again, with more force this time.

"I killed a lot of people, and this war is a horrible thing, and I ain't lying."

"I know," I said.

But I often find myself forgetting. I was arrested protesting this war at its beginning, and I have a friend who fought in it. Yet it ony touches me in tangential and indirect ways - I go about my daily life protected by two oceans and two pussy-whipped neighbors, and if anything my quality of life has improved since the war began almost 3 and a half years ago.

But the vets don't forget. And thank God they don't, because it's so easy for something as horrible and immediate as war to become vague and abstract in my sheltered little mind.

He let go of my hand, and looked back at me with doubt as he closed the door, like I didn't understand what he was trying to say. And having not killed anyone myself, there's a very good chance that I didn't except in the most abstract and intellectuaized terms.

A Draining Night

2006-07-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

So many things happened last night, each of them normally worthy of a post here. My first thought when I got home was that I should list everything, and then write a series of more in-depth posts all about the night of July 29th/30th. But when I saw the list, and it was so long, I figured I should just replicate it here:

I was in such a hurry to get on the list that I forgot my lease money at home. This ended up being a non-issue, as the weekend superintendent said I could drop.

While sitting around waiting/hoping to be called, L (a day owner) told me, H, and D about his health problems due to Agent Orange exposure. He takes 22 pills a day.

D, a driver I really like a lot, decided not to drive after all, but kept hanging around the garage and talking about his struggles with being bi-polar. I was supportive of him, but didn't realize until after I'd gone out that he must be very lonely and was basically looking/asking for help. I felt very bad for not asking him for his cell phone number.

E told me a great story about having to deliver two lobsters from Jake's to McCormick & Schmick's. What made this story funny was that he didn't charge them the delivery rate, but the passenger rate (including an extra dollar for the second lobster).

I was the last person to get a cab. It was a 7-7, which I prefer but are relatively rare, and had a CD player. The condition of my getting it was that I not smoke in it (I've been smoking like normal since around the time of the move, and it really sucks).

I gave R, the guy on whose reccomendation I got the job and someone I really respect, a ride home after getting in the car at 6. He gave me $20 for this, which was pretty unnecessary. I stopped quickly for a red light, and R told me not to that afraid of the Safety Board, R had resigned, and R (the one I was driving) might go back on it.

I then went home to take a shower, and arrived just as my wonderful roommate was taking various and sundry deliciously prepared fish off the grill and smoker. Some old friends showed up, and until 7:45 I enjoyed good food and company instead of sitting in the cab in a clogged zone.

My first "real" fare was the sister of Copywrite from MHz. I was listening to Ropeladder, the old MUSH records compilation, and we had a good conversation about indie hip-hop and old friends of hers from Columbus like RJD2, Blueprint, and Camu Tao who were growing more popular.

I picked up a black guy who was on crutches and had recently shattered a leg when a bus hit his bike. We talked about our mutual bike injuries, resulting surgeries, and how being uninsured is not fun in such a situation.

A white guy in his early fifties was going from Cocktails & Dreams to the Voodoo downtown. He was newly single, owned an adult bookstore, and kept nagging me to tell him about my sex life and where brothels were. I eventually told him where some brothels were, and he only tipped me a dollar.

I did the dumbest thing I've ever done at work, and locked my keys in the cab while buying water at the Chevron on MLK & Fremont. The dispatcher asked me who my friends working were, so that she could find me someone who would do it for cheap and spare me the embarassment of having a fleet message go out. I told her that I knew E and E were working, and maybe G. She said she'd get E to do it. While I waited about 20 minutes for E, I made an instant connection and friendship with B, a one-legged black Sufi in his early 20s. I'll hopefully be hanging out with him a bunch on slow nights from here on out, a really bright and kind person. We talked about people's bullshit, and how not to let it get you down. Finally an E showed up, but it wasn't the E I know, another woman who I barely know but enjoy a lot. She wouldn't let me pay her, and I felt bad that someone I don't know got specifically asked to do me a favor. She was really gracious though, as I would've expected.

My next trip was a Latino/a transvestite to Embers (gay bar downtown).

I drove some white stoner death metal fans with dreadlocks to a show at Sabala's. They spent the entire trip talking about their dream of becoming glass pipe and bong entrepreneurs.

I picked up a very drunk middle-eastern kid at Sewickley's Addition around 12:30 AM. He told me to be quick, he was late to work. He works the midnight to 8 AM shift at Taboo adult video at 82nd & Division.

At 1 AM, I picked up a very weird middle aged white couple who needed to get home with the groceries they'd just bought.

I took some drunk and racist white guys to a private party that underachieving Blazers power forward Zach Randolph was throwing at their friend's bar downtown.

After that, I got immediately flagged by underachieving Blazers power forward Zach Randolph's uncle and bodyguard. He had me rush him to the dive motel on 82nd & Sandy so he could meet his "young lady."

After dropping him off, I was immediately flagged by a black woman with a severe asthma attack who had me sprinting her all over Northeast. She paid me half what it cost, and tipped me with a container of shaving cream.

A little bit later, I got a message on my MDT that said "BRD MEMBER SAYS SLOW WAY DOWN." I told the dispatcher about the woman with asthma, and asked her to pass it along to the board member. He'd stopped working after the bar rush (of course), and she said he was the kind of guy who would write someone up. The dispatchers love me, though, and she said she'd make sure the board member got my message. Still, given my last experience with the Safety Board, I am afraid for my job.

At around 3:30, I picked up a nicely dressed, middle-aged heterosexual white couple who weren't all that drunk but were DUMB AS FUCKING STONES. They couldn't understand why there weren't any strip clubs still open. I ended up taking them to the brothel/arcade mentioned here

My next trip was a sobbing blonde woman in her early 20s at Legacy Emmanuel. She told me about having just left her physically abusive boyfriend. She was leaving her friend at the hospital, who was being hit by her boyfriend. The friend wasn't the one in the hospital, it was her boyfriend. Another guy had beaten the boyfriend into a coma earlier in the night when he saw the boyfriend treating my fare's friend like shit. The fare's friend's eye was still closed from being punched last week. The fare's friend, for some inexplicable reason, felt like it was her fault that her boyfriend was in the hospital. I will never be able to understand this.

At 4:30 AM, I took a man in Beaverton to buy edible panties for his girlfriend. He told me about how a helicopter almost crashed into a building when he was installing Air Conditioners downtown, but that it didn't make the news. He was really looking forward to eating those panties.

At 5:15 AM, dispatch took pity on me and threw me a $47 airporter from Canyon Road since I was one of the few people deep in the west side.

After that, I ran a small airporter where a college professor actively encouraged me not to go back to school. She's basically of the opinion that higher education is a soul-crushing intellectual prison.

I got a ride home from J, a female night driver I hadn't met before. She seems really cool, and we talked about racist cab drivers and the ways in which people subconsciously create circumstances that fulfill both their fears and desires.

Things I didn't do because for some reason I thought making money was more important since I'm leaving town next weekend:

Go to the Fridge's 100th year anniversary party, where many old friends of mine were.

Go to the PDX Pop Now! after party I was invited to, where I could've mingled with Portland's uber-hip indie rock elite.

Go to see 2 Oboes, my favorite musical act in Portland.

Anyways, I'm taking tonight off. I'm spent.

...We Call it Home

2006-07-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

Last night was great, just very relaxing. The whole helping beaten women and fighting men with cerebral palsy thing had been starting to weigh on me, so it was wonderful to have just a nice, peaceful, bullshit-free, and lucrative evening.

It started with me hanging out at the garage for three and a half hours, and it looking like I wasn't going to get a cab. The last hour of which was spent listening to another cabbie my age talk endlessly about how he couldn't take much more of this job, and had to get a new one. Good times. I can certainly understand where he's coming from, but am still a ways away from that point myself. I'm still optimistic about and enjoying the job, it's when intense things happen in short periods of time that I start to get angsty. This cat was complaining about how boring the job was. I love this job when it's boring. Not "sitting around and reading because there's no work" boring, but the "everything's cruising along nicely" boring.

So I was waiting around with very faint hopes, not expecting to get a cab, and B waltzes in to get his. B is a swarthy, grizzled old cab-driver who's central casting's idea of a retired hitman who just wants to raise his granddaughter in peace. Raspy growl of a voice, shaved gray hair with a goatee, always wear sunglasses, stocky dude who looks like he can lick any SOB in the house. Homeboy's scary. I wish I could tell you what "B" is short for, because it's his actual name, and it's fucking perfect for him.

Anyway, he sauntered into the room, asked if me and the other two guys are waiting for cabs, then pointed at me, smiled, and growled "How would you like to drive my cab."

See, the grizzled old lease drivers love me. I don't even really know many of the other hip, young, cab drivers' names. But the lifers and I are chill. Whether or not this is a particularly good sign is debatable, but it tends to tangibly come in handy a lot more often than cultivating an impressive array of tattoos to show off around the garage would.

Anyway, my response to B was, and I quote, "Fuck yeah." B's got a nice ride. He's a lease driver, but he's got a steady on this pimped out little number with sheepskin seat covers. No great stereo, but it drives nice. So B talks to the superintendent, and I'm paying his lease and driving his car for the night.

I get out, do a quick little $15 fare, and then get a $35 trip out to Tualatin. Instead of deadheading back without looking at the map or screen like I often used to (my new project is learning the western suburbs), I check it out, and immediately after dropping off get a call like 20 blocks away. Going back to Portland, another $35. Do another $15 trip as soon as I got back, and I've paid my lease in less than 2 hours, with all of Friday night ahead of me.

See, that paragraph right there is another example of the kind of stories cabbies love, but aren't very interesting to most other people.

Not many stories tonight that were all that interesting. Had my second conversation in as many weeks about jazz drummers with someone else who knows jazz drummers. This guy didn't think I was crazy when I told him that while I could appreciate Max Roach, I'd just never been able to get into him. Also agreed with me that Danny Richmond is criminally under-appreciated. It's really all about Art Blakey, who too many people my age who are into jazz seem to have just not been exposed to enough of.

The guy who does the 3AM - 6AM show on KBOO every other Saturday morning has always pissed me off. He plays a lot of music by underground artists I know and love, and he always plays their most pop and/or subpar stuff. As a very serious music geek/snob, I've always found his aesthetic admirable and his actual taste seriously offensive, if that makes any sense at all. I always try to avoid this show, and just listen to the Friday night/Saturday morning blues marathon on KMHD instead.

At 4:30, however, I gave "Further" (the name of this guy's show) a whirl. And the first thing I heard were the opening bars to "Angular," the first song on Shopping Carts Crashing. He was doing some APC retrospective or whatever. I was just really happy, as I'd had the song stuck in my head Thursday, but hadn't listened to it, and it never gets played on the radio. I love me some Anti-Pop, I was the first person to play them on the radio in Portland, the person who introduced them to the Mercury, the person who introduced them to my college. And loser that I am, I've always taken some pride in that, of having discovered something I loved and helped get the ball rolling in bringing it to others. And this guy I can't stand hit me with just what I needed.

I know that this is interesting to absolutely no one, but it's the kind of small moment that can push the job from just a job to a lot of fun, suddenly driving around to music I love and explaining to the black kid in the back seat why I think this is the illest shit on earth, and him really digging it, the crazy vocals and wonderfully put together backing tracks, telling me that it's nice to have a cool cab driver for once (most of the hip young cabbies are definitely not working outer Northeast).

Then, of course, Mr. "Further" starts playing whack tracks from their solo projects, so I call him up, and it turns out that he doesn't even know any of the songs by name. I have him play "Tuff Gong" and "Driving in Circles," and everything's wonderful.

And yes, I understand completely that none of this makes me cool, and in fact reveals large swaths of my inner geekitude. But fuck it, I had fun last night. All my passengers were polite, many were fun, and some were interesting.

I'm listening to "Flatlands" by Sonicsum right now, whereas this morning I was listening to Earth. This reveals an enormous amount of attitudinal shift for people who have any idea what "Flatlands" and Earth sound like. Hm... let's just say for those who for some reason don't happen to be down with both drone metal and U.K. avant hip-hop that "Flatlands" always puts a smile on my face, and is a beautiful track constructed around a haunting old Tangerine Dream keyboard sample.

Earth, on the other hand, is essentially Dylan Carlson. Carlson played a huge part in inspiring the contemporary North American harsh noise scene (I'm especially looking at you, guys with guitar drones and effects pedals), but is most famous for being the guy who took Kurt Cobain to buy the shotgun Cobain blew his head off with (said shotgun having been purchased here in Portland at the much lamented Maury's Gun's Rack, formerly at SE 82nd & Woodstock). Some would argue that making Cobain listen to earth2 at high volumes would have done the job just as effectively though (I kid because I love, Earth is wonderful stuff).

Ugliness

2006-07-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I got a call around 4 AM to pick-up at the Safeway at 122nd & Powell. The "additional remarks" on the order, where the phone number or fare's location typically are, said "Red dress, no cell phone."

I instantly started getting bad vibes. The chances of something good going on with someone wearing a red dress and stuck at Safeway at 4 AM in that neighborhood are basically nil. My assumption was that I was going to be getting a meth geek and/or prostitute.

Instead, I pulled up, and a gorgeous young white woman in a beautiful dress (not too revealing or conservative, perfectly suited to her body) waved at me. I pulled up, and the first thing I noticed was a two or three inch long cut and the beginning of bruising on her left cheek.

And suddenly I was furious. In control, and not outwardly so, but still completely livid. Not at her, of course. I once had an argument with a friend about whether or not it was messed up that I basically consider hitting a woman worse than killing a man. This woman had obviously been hit, and hit very hard.

She went into Safeway to tell them that her cab had arrived, while I sat in the cab waiting for her and gnashed my teeth. She asked me to take her down the road to 122nd & Holgate. When I asked, she told me that she'd been hit by her boyfriend, thrown from a car, and that then he'd come back and tried to pull her back into the car.

I pulled into the parking lot, and a man was sitting directly in front of us in my head lights, with a gash down the right side of his nose. "A lot of people getting hit out here tonight," I thought to myself. She told me that she was going to get her purse, and that I was to call 911 if she wasn't back in two minutes. I asked her if she was about to go back into a situation where she might be hit again.

"I don't know," she said. I told her that there was no way I was going to let that happen. I'd give her a free ride anywhere she wanted, if paying me was the reason she was worried about the purse. She explained to me that her keys were in the purse, along with the cell phone. I told her that I was going to go to the apartment with her, then, that I couldn't in good conscience do anything else. She agreed to this.

We got out of the car, and I grabbed my cell phone, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. I didn't like the look of the beat-up looking guy in the parking lot. We walked up to a townhouse style apartment, and she knocked at the door several times. A dog barked on the other side, she said it was hers and seemed on the verge of tears. The lights were off, and no one came to the door after repeated knockings. "Let's get out of here," I told her. "I'll take you anywhere you want to go, a friend's, wherever, let's just get out of here." She finally agreed, and we turned to go.

Walking towards us was the man from the parking lot. He was short, but large. Large in a muscle-bound way. Large in a "Crabbie has no chance in hell in a fight with this guy" way.

"Can I have my purse back?" she asked him. Without a word, he unlocked his SUV, got the purse out, and threw it with moderate force into her midsection. She caught it, which impressed me. They stared each other in the eye for a few seconds, every muscle in my body tensed and ready to throw down and try my best, maybe brain him with the cell phone Naomi Campbell-style.

Then she turned and walked away.

We got back in the car, and I just started driving. She was headed to Milwaukie, her father owns two house across the street from each other. She had keys to the unused one. She explained to me what happened: he'd wanted her to have sex with another man while he watched. She hadn't wanted too. He'd gotten more insistent, more drunk. She'd gotten scared and left. He'd followed her to the bar she went to, pulled her into the car, punched her, and after she'd hit him with a large ring, he'd thrown her out at Safeway. She'd rushed in and asked them to call her a cab. She hadn't noticed him in the parking lot.

She was proud that he looked more beat-up than her. So was I. She's a criminal justice major, also teaches pre-school. She's studying forensics, wants to find missing children for a living. She's beautiful, smart, kind, and packs a punch. I felt myself falling for her, slipping into Travis Bickle land. I pulled myself out of it.

About halfway to her father's, she asked me if a white Toyota 4-Runner was following us. I felt my heart skip a beat and feel fatally stupid, I hadn't been watching for this. There was indeed a white Toyota 4-Runner behind us. I took a quick, swerving turn onto a side street before the truck could respond. A few more evasive maneuvers. The SUV wasn't there anymore, but I'd been so focused on trying to shake it I didn't see if it had tried to follow.

I also noticed that the passenger side mirror has been detached from its motor.

I drove her to her father's. She told me that the guy was history. I asked for her phone number so she could confirm the story about the mirror, as I'd have to write a report to cover my ass. I also gave her my card. She'd said that she didn't want to call the cops, to ruin the guy's life, that she just wanted him gone. I told her that that was fine, but that if she ever changed her mind, I'd testify for her.

I told her that she didn't have to pay me, but she insisted. The $30 on the meter, plus a $10 tip. It ends up saving a night of atrocious business luck, making it tolerable.

I didn't really give a fuck. I just wanted to stop at home, grab the baseball bat, and go back out to Holgate.

Instead I soon-to-cleared in zone 112, and went back to work.

I've been bad about updating the blog. I think that this is partly due to me not working as much, partly due to my recent move, and partly me generally being in kind of a funk of late. That this slacking also occurred just as a few people I don't know started reading and enjoying this is also both unsurprising and instructive. I'll try to be better about it.

Workplace encounter leads to Crabbie's meditation on human violence

2006-07-17T06:32:00.000-07:00

A very interesting night, and it began with my being offered a very interesting opportunity. I'm going to have to be coy on that front, but it's pretty exciting.

Anyway, a story, though only tangentially cab related...

D.'s a cab driver who works the Felony Flats area, a part of town I also work with some frequency. I'll see him in the parking lot at the Fred Meyer on 82nd & Foster, and we'll shoot the shit and bum each other cigarettes. He's really tall, probably around 6'8" or 6'9", white guy who was in the Army. I always figured he was about my age.

He is, in fact, older. Talking to him today about how little either of us has enjoyed our past time on pain killers, he referenced being shot in the hip. I asked him where this happened, and he told me about his time in Somalia.

Black Hawk Down is a very excellent book and one of the more amazing pieces of journalism written in the last decade (much, much better than its jingoistic, "America, Fuck Yeah!" movie adaptation), so I guess I'll just reccomend it in lieu of recounting most of D.'s story here. Suffice it to say that he had a lot of friends die on that day. Himself, he was stabbed four times in the back after his commanders sent him back into battle even after he'd seen most of his platoon split up and killed or wounded. After being stabbed, the Humvee transporting him broke down, and he was shot twice in the hip while being carried on a stretcher. D. wasn't a Ranger, just one of the grunts sent in after them.

When he got back from Somalia, he went AWOL for a year, distraught over the death of so many of his friends. He "lived in Montana and grew a beard, like Rambo," then went back into the service for two years. Now he sleeps on a hide-a-bed with his girlfriend and doesn't make as much money driving a cab as he probably could. I'd always kind of smugly taken this in with a "more money for me" attitude, but now that it re-occurs to me as I write this, I think I'll probably give him some pointers.

I don't know what point I really have here - I'm neither trying to say "war is hell" nor "God bless our fighting men and women." Or maybe I'm trying to say both. I just think it's fucked up that people shoot and stab each other, basically. D. probably killed people while he was in Mogadishu, and people tried to kill him. This doesn't make him suddenly not one of the nicest cabbies I know, nor does it necessarily make the Somalis who were trying to kill him bad people. He raised this last point himself.

It's also sobering to me to realize that I'm not interested in helping other drivers make more money unless a) I like them and b) they have some quality that makes me feel they're deserving of my help.

I heard Elie Wiesel on NPR tonight, before talking to D., actually. I've never been one of Wiesel's biggest fans, but hearing him as opposed to reading him allowed to me to stop thinking of him as pretentious. He actually seems like an incredibly beautiful person. He said two things that struck me in particular, the latter of which I actually hurried to scribble down while driving on the freeway, given my fascination with stories and why they're told:

"Peace is not God's gift to us, it is our gift to each other."

and

"What else can we do today but tell the story, and hope the story itself becomes a prayer?"

I should add that this "D" is not the same as the one mentioned earlier. All cab driver names used in this blog are just the first initial of the first name, so there will be overlap and confusion. I guess that there are ways of remedying this, but I don't really care.

Bloody Hummus, DMT, Peter Carroll and Wu-Tang

2006-07-16T06:03:00.000-07:00

A wonderful night last night, everything I look for in a Saturday. This also means that nothing terribly exciting or amusing happened.

I picked up a young, semi-conservatively dressed, white woman around my age at The Bloody Hummus House (a house where the inhabitants throw shows, I've seen friends play there and driven one of the people who live there before). We started talking, and only ten blocks before I dropped her off it came out that she was going to Mexico and Nicaragua to study with shamans. I asked her if she was going to be doing a bunch of ayahuasca while she was there, and she said that she was thinking about it but still very much on the fence. She then told me about doing DMT at a rave in Denver when she was 16, and hallucinating blood that streamed down the walls and got in her pores.

I didn't have time to give her my DMT soliloquy, but it's a substance I've always been fascinated by and thought a lot about, but never used. I've always kind of figured that it's something I'll get to experience when I die anyway. It was also a conversation I'd already had with friends the night before (I didn't work Friday, but instead went to see A Scanner Darkly).

She paid with a credit card, and while it ran I asked her if she'd read any Peter J. Carroll (founding figure in the creation of chaos magic or, as he often calls it, "freestyle shamanism"). She said, no, and asked me to write down his name and some titles.

As she was getting out of the cab, she asked what we were listening to. I told her that it was the first Ghostface album, and she got really excited and we had a nice 30 second conversation wherein she described The Wu-Tang Clan as "geniuses."

I guess my point in writing this is that I really love the fact that I live in a city where I can pick someone up at a place called The Bloody Hummus House, freely talk with them about extremely powerful hallucinogens and magic, and end the interaction with a bit of mutual Wu-Tang adoration. I guess this is actually many major cities, but it seems like the percentage of people that I can potentially have these conversations with, without the other person looking and acting like a complete fruitcake and fully believing in that stuff, is much higher here.

It's also probably a signal that I should have proposed to this woman, or at least given her my card, as we seem to think very similarly about similar thing. But she wasn't all that hot, and I guess that I'm just shallow like that.

Cheat Codes

2006-07-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

"So where we headed tonight, sir?"

"Scanning..."

"Excuse me?"

"Scanning..."

"Sir?"

"48th & Glisan."

The man I've picked up at the bar around 67th and Glisan is pretty dodgy looking, and speaks with the clipped tones of an autistic. He also seems pretty drunk. As I begin driving west on Glisan I punch buttons on the MDT, telling it that I'll be dropping off soon.

"Let me put in the cheat codes," he says.

"Huh?"

"I can make it so we do an insane stunt bonus."

"No insane stunt bonuses in this car man, I lose points for that."

"How about flying? I know the code that can make us fly."

"I'm no good at the flying levels, and it's a short trip. Let's just drive."

"Scanning..."

This is by far the greatest Grand Theft Auto conversation I've ever had. The idea of entering a cheat code into my mobile data terminal and being able to suddenly fly or magically evade the police is delightful.

"Stop at the Plaid here."

I pull in so he can buy more beer, and then drive him home. "You should have let me enter the cheat codes," he says. He tips me anyway.

The Greeks

2006-07-10T05:01:00.000-07:00

I didn't work last night, and'll be taking the next few days off to pack and move my stuff. In the meantime, here's another old story lifted from an email to a friend (some edits made, XXXX isn't the other company's actual name). And yes, I'm very aware of how appalling the language on this website is. It bothers me, and I swear that I don't talk or think in such vulgarities when I'm not driving a cab or relaying the experience to others. Anyway, onto the Greeks:

So it's about 1 AM on Saturday night, and I get a call for two cabs to pick up at Madison's, this bar that's basically at SE 11 and Hawthorne. I pull up and there's no one there, but at a building that shares a parking lot with it there's a bunch of yelling and screaming and people clustered around. I call the phone number that came with the order (part of driving a cab is that I have a cell now, it's like a virus in my pocket), and I talk to some guy who assures me that people will be coming out soon. I wait and wait, while these two overweight middle aged, olive skinned men throw wild punches at each other, and one is eventually moved by force to a XXXX Taxi (small company reputedly run by the Russian mob) that was there. Meanwhile more XXXX Taxis pull up, and another guy from my company behind me.

We wait some more, and all that's happening is a bunch of people yelling in Greek accents at the guy who'd been moved by force into the XXXX cab, and all I can think is that this is costing me money and who the fuck are these dumbshits that all they can do is stand around and yell the same things repeatedly at each other, none of which seem either particularly hostile or conciliatory, but more to be variations on "Hey, I love you Georgie!" and "No, Paulie, I love you!" and "You guys leave!" etc. It appeared to just be a bunch of drunk-ass people at a wedding, and I call the guy who works there again and tell him that I'm taking off, that the Russians can drive them all over town. He's really apologetic and gives me and the other driver from my company $10 each, which is supremely chill and understanding and something that no one ever does.

Anyway, just as I'm getting ready to pull out, this drunk ass woman throws her 13 year old daughter and 10 year old son in the cab and tells me to wait while she grabs her husband. I tell her I will, but that I'm going to start the meter. She proceeds to go back into the building, and I'm left with her extremely drunk children talking at great length trying to remember where there hotel is. I just ask them if their parents know where it is, and the girl says "no, I don't think so... was it the Vintage Plaza Suites? Union Vintage Plaza?"

I'm starting to get really, really pissed off, and finally the woman comes back with her shitfaced 15 yr. old son and insanely drunk fat husband. I finally get them in the car, and nobody knows where they're going, or seems particularly interested in finding out for me so that I can take them there, but rather in talking about whether the 15 yr. old's going to fuck his cousin or not (she's hot, he should, is the Dad's verdict). The mother occasionally hits the two boys really hard for no apparent reason.

Finally, it's determined that we're going to Georgie's house, only no one knows where Georgie lives. Georgie's in one of the XXXX Taxis (where a very similar scene seems to be taking place), so I get out to ask him. The problem is that Georgie is so fucking blind drunk that he doesn't understand the question "where do you live?" and does nothing but blink, rock back and forth, and ocasionally yell "I love all of you motherfuckers!" I ask if there's an address of some kind, and one of the women gives me one in Southwest that I've never heard of before, and the Russian driver mumbles something almost completely incomprehensibe (and what I can understand involves taking a right at an intersection between 2 streets that don't meet).

I go back to my cab, planning on telling the Greeks to pay me what's on the meter, get the fuck out, and never call us again, when the XXXX Taxi with Georgie in it drives by just as I get in. "Follow that cab!" screams the husband, and suddenly I'm all about it, as I'd never thought I'd ever get to be in a position where someone screamed at me to follow a car. So I tear ass out of the parking lot and follow the Russian (who turns out to actually be a very good and safe driver, which makes the whole chase pretty mundane and not very exciting). The mother and I get into this long discussion about whether I'm going to let her smoke in the cab, and it turns out that the answer is "yes" when she promises to both give me a big tip and pay the $50 fine if the superintendent catches us (as he likes to patrol that area). I figure that since we're going to Southwest, it'll be a decent amount on the meter, and thus a very nice tip, and maybe this whole ordeal will end up being almost worth it.

Anyway, we end up driving all the way out to Tualatin, with this insane multi-part conversation going on between father and older son (re: older son fucking cousin), father and mother (re: why are they going to Georgie's, and didn't the family love him?), and daughter and me (13 year old drunk as all fuck Greek girl from New York trying to flirt with 26 year old cabbie concerned with following a Russian and calculating how fast he can get back to Portland). All of these conversations are made even more fascinating by the fact that while all passengers are competent in English, they aren't exactly fluent, either (lack of articles, using adjectives for adverbs, etc.) It's not clear at all whether this is due to immigration, drunkeness or sheer stupidity, though all indications point to a combination of all three with a heavy weighting toward the latter.

When we finally get to Georgie's house, it's everything that a gauchely nouveau riche Greek (I should note that I keep emphasizing that these people are Greek as a means of tagging them culturally, not because I see an inherent relationship between one's being Greek and one's being dumb as a stone, but rather to point out that when Greeks are idiots, they are idiots in this sort of way), moron living in Tualatin would possibly want. We pass through two gates to get in, obnoxious landscaping that consists mostly of weeping willows whose branches hang out into the windsheld of cars driving down the lengthy driveway, gargantuan house with eight car garage and grand staircase leading up to fifteen foot high solid wood double doors, etc., etc.

$46 on the meter, I'm stoked. $4 tip, and another five minute wait to get out. After they've gotten out, and her parents are laboring up the steps and Georgie's still in the first cab hugging the Russian cabbie (and at one point even trying to French kiss him), the 13 year old girl turns around, pulls down the front of her incredibly expensive dress, and flahses me her tits.

I don't even bother booking in out in the western suburbs, I just tear ass back into Portland to get the bar rush - normal fucking drunk people my age, from my city. This job will turn me into a misanthrope yet.

Hurl

2006-07-09T06:51:00.000-07:00

I didn't work Friday night, just didn't feel like it after Thursday. From what I hear, I'm glad I trusted my instincts. Worked tonight, though, and it was okay. Summer seems to have finally caught up with me, but I ended up doing respectably.

While sitting around the garage for two and a half hours to get my name called for a cab (an absolutely thrilling aspect of working Friday & Saturday nights), I got to do some yammering with D. D's about the closest thing we've got to the cliche of a motor-mouthed, wise-cracking East Coast cabbie lifer. Most of our drivers are very much out of the mellow Pacific Northwest mold, with a few African immigrants and misanthropic troglodytes sprinkled in for color.

Anyway, D's a blast, and I always love shooting the shit with him. I tease him about not being fat enough to have really driven a cab for 21 years, he teases me about not being ugly enough to not have a girlfriend. So basically we complement each other through insults. I also give him tips on how to make more money, and he drops "customer service" knowledge on me, some of which I almost used today.

I was telling D that I have a standing rule: if someone's so drunk they can't stand, I won't give them a ride. D tells me that he'll take 'em that way, and'll even take people so drunk they can't give him directions. He takes them all right - he takes them straight to detox. And the kind folk at Hooper will not only peel the drunk out of your cab, but pay you out of their wallet. This is important information to have, especially as Hooper's in a very central location that's essentially at the intersection of three busy zones - not many good fares to there from most bars, but a trip there sets you up for something quick if you're paying attention to the MDT and using the "soon to clear" function optimally (this last sentence is me talking to D, whom I've been trying to teach not to be so lazy with the computer).

Tonight I picked up a guy who almost gave me occasion to put D's tip into action. His wife was with him, though, so we ended up going to their home in Vancouver instead. I pulled up to pick them up in front of the Kennedy School (for non-Portland readers, this is an old elementary school that's been turned into a bar/hotel/movie theater), and the man couldn't stand without his wife's assistence. His boss tried to distract me from this fact by bombarding me with questions about how much the trip would cost while they tried to get in, but this is exactly the sort of situation that locks were invented for. I eventually worked it out with the boss (who'd rewarded his star salesman a little too well) that the trip could potentially get up as high as $35 on the meter, and explained that there was an extra $50 charge for vomit in the cab. He handed cash to the wife, and I let them get in.

I've never had someone puke in my cab, a record I attribute almost entirely to my making it very clear to potential culprits from the outset what the cost will be. It worked again this time, as after we'd gone about 30 blocks the man tapped my shoulder and the wife cried "pull over!"

I did, and about two or three minutes of Linda Blair level theatrics followed (my apologies to those using the bike lane later that night). It was quite a show, and it took a fair amount of self-control not to whip out the phone's video camera function. He really did seem to get it all out, though, and perked up considerably after that in the sense that he stopped moaning pathetically.

They ended up being quite a nice couple, and the wife gave me a decent tip on the $30 fare. They were very impressed with the quickness with which I got there, that I knew how to get where they were going, and was cool and understanding about the whole vomit thing. A lot of talk about how amazing better my cab company is than the others in the area, and it being like a whole new experience. I thanked them, and told them it was by far the most stress-free vomiting experience I'd ever had on the job.

"Thank goodness you're smart!"

2006-07-07T02:38:00.000-07:00

I get a call tonight to pick up at a non-existant address. I show up where it should be (8th & Brazee), call the phone number, and am told that the actual place to pick up is thirty blocks further north at 8th & Alberta.

As I'm turning a block and a half away from the correct address, a strung-out looking white woman with stringy hair literally runs out in front the cab waving at me. I of course stop, and she tells me that she's the person I'm there to pick-up.

"Thank goodness you're smart!" she says. Shen then tells me that she's not from this part of town so she doesn't know the address. How being from a different part of town keeps her from reading numbers, I don't know.

She then launches into a stream-of-consciousness ramble about how it's good I was smart because that wasn't a good part of town for a white woman to be in (not true), how much she likes my music, it's Latin isn't it? (no) Pig Latin, no Lebanese (yes), she has lots of international friends, mixed bag, from all over, she grew up on an Indian reservation in Washington, do I know it? (no) She used to be a drug addict, but not anymore (unlikely), though she does drink (obviously), but she learned that drugs are illegal the hard way so she doesn't do them anymore. She got in a lot of trouble in drugs once where she's from in Canada, and it was serious enough that they could have taken her Canadian citizenship away even though she was born there (um, no). Do I have a card? (hell no) Do I have a personal number (hell no). She's only in town for a couple weeks and takes cabs to get everywhere, her estranged husband will pay when we get there. Wow, she likes my music. That wasn't a good part of town for a white woman to be in, all the white women she saw there were drug addicts (...). Here's how to get to 14th & Yamhill (incorrect, and thus disregarded). Oh, so you can go this way too? Hold on!

She jumps out of the car and I just shrug to myself, for this woman to run would be keeping in complete character with the night so far. But to my amazement, her husband indeed does come from around the corner, and does in fact pay me. In keeping with my expectations at the beginning of the trip, there is no tip.

I netted $5 an hour tonight. I could've ridden out my shift and bumped that up to around $10, but I decided to turn in early, something I've never done before. Being able to do some packing for my upcoming move and get a good night's sleep just struck me as being vastly superior to a work that, by 2am was solidly entrenched as my worst ever from a financial standpoint. The thing is, when the back-up super handed me my slip for a car I absolutely hate, I came really close to handing it back to him, saying "thanks, but no thanks," and not working tonight.

Always trust your first instinct.

Alcoholism

2006-07-06T03:20:00.000-07:00

My Desktop: 01.29.2006
Originally uploaded by powerbooktrance.

I've taken a good four nights off in a row now, both from work and updating this bad boy, so I guess I'll try to get back to telling older stories.

Something that I've really only touched upon in this blog so far, but is incredibly central to who I am and how I approach my job, is the fact that I'm a recovering alcoholic. This means that I used to drink (and, to a lesser extent, use drugs like a madman). It also means that these days the most powerful substances I put in my body are sugar, nicotine, and occasionally caffeine.

This is a good thing, both for me and you. Believe me, if I were giving you a ride home from the bar a year and a half ago, we were both going to get some practice at "letting go and letting God."

My first night driving a cab, I got a call to pick up at Ya Hala, one of my favorite restaurants in town. Lebanese place around 80th & Stark. I pulled up and they were closing down, the hostess came out and asked me to wait. She escorted out a middle-aged white woman who looked middle-class and respectable. She tried to get in the front seat, and I asked her politely to sit in back. Instead of doing so, she turned around and started walking toward 82nd. I got out and asked her if she wanted a ride.

"I want to go home." She said.

"Well okay, get in."

"I don't feel safe in the back."

"Where do you live?" (note that, saint that I am, I've already learned by my first night to measure my level of accommodation by the size of the fare)

"Around 26th & Taylor," she replies.

"That's cool, I'll move my stuff. You're headed in the wrong direction anyway if you're trying to get home" I did so. This woman appeared to be very drunk, and I didn't feel like I could in good conscience let any woman that tanked stroll around 82nd late at night (it's a street renowned for its prostitutes).

She got in the cab and immediately started doing this snuffling/crying thing. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that she kept trying to quit drinking, but just couldn't.

I told her that I'd been sober for a while, and when she asked me how and why I'd done it I told her the truth - that I'd spent most of my life miserable and filled with fear, and most of my life since my adolescence drunk or high on something. I'd basically gotten to a point where I was sick of feeling useless and incapable of doing anything. That it took me another year or so of increasing desperation to finally put two and two together and realize that maybe I was so ineffectual and unmotivated because I was getting shitfaced all the time. That after failing miserably at attempts to control and moderate my drinking, I decided that I should give AA a shot, and that I've been sober ever sine. I also told her that the easiest thing for me, when I was tempted to drink or use, was to just compare my life then and my life now, and see just how much happier and positive I feel now that I'm sober.

"I just can't do it," she said.

"Are you happy?"

"No."

"Do you feel like you can control your drinking?"

"No."

"Do you think you'd be happier if you cut it out? That maybe you wouldn't find yourself in situations like this, crying to a cab driver at one in the morning about how unhappy you are?"

"Yes."

"Well, this is just my opinion, but it sounds to me like you'd be a complete idiot to keep on drinking."

"Take me to Zupan's to get some wine."

I explained to her that Zupan's was closed, as was Fred Meyer and the corner stores around her (I forgot about the Plaid on Belmont, and couldn't remember whether Walgreen's sells booze). "Look," I told her, "if you really want a drink, I'll buy the goddamn thing for you, but I can't tell you how fucking dumb that sounds to me."

And I meant it - I'm not the type to try and ram my way of life down anyone else's throat, and've always been of the opinion that the only way someone's ever going to be convinced they're alcoholic is if they somehow manage to convince themselves with their own massively self-destructive behavior and self-loathing.

So she asked me to take her to her boyfriend's. I did, and she asked me to come up to his apartment with her, because he'd have to pay me. He was sober too, and she'd be safe with him. We go up there, and she knocks on the door.

"Go away," he says.

"Please let me in."

"No, go away and leave me alone, I've got my own problems."

"I just want a hug."

"Fuck you."

"You always bug me for sex, and I just want a hug!"

"Go away."

etc.

We ended up leaving, with her of course doing her snuffling thing like ten times worse than before. I took her home, gave her the ride for free, and told her that in my opinion she'd be a lot better off going to an AA meeting in the morning, dumping her boyfriend, and not drinking.

I guess my whole point in posting this story is that in a lot of ways I'm profoundly grateful for this job. As a recovering alcoholic driving a cab nights, I get constant reminders of what my life used to be like, what it could potentially revert back to, and just how bad it could eventually get. Because honestly, I got pretty pathetic there for a while, and I don't ever want to get to the point that some of my customers get to.

And like I said, I'm no great preacher, but it's also good to be in a position where I can occasionally show people that there are other ways to go about things. And though this is a job, and I do it to get paid, there is a small satisfaction that comes in keeping drunks off the road.

But there's a bigger one in getting paid, and even bigger one in hassle-free nights that are light on the kind of drunken idiocy I used to specialize in.

Cripple Fight!

2006-07-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

I had my first-ever physical altercation on the job last night.

I got a call to pick up at a sports bar around 82nd & Division. The guy inside told me he'd be out in a second, so I went back to the cab. I saw him get off his barstool inside, and he couldn't stand, and two men had to help him walk outside. My first instinct was to tell them he wasn't going to get a ride, but I noticed that his legs seemed to be moving weirdly in a way that didn't seem drunk so much as the way someone with cerebral palsy walks. They told me he was disabled and asked if I'd help him in when he got home, and I cheerily agreed. When he told me that he was going to 183rd & Stark, I was even cheerier.

He had some food with him, and began to eat it. As we turned onto Stark, I asked him in a perfectly normal, polite, and non-confrontational way to please not eat in the cab, if he could wait. Note that I didn't tell him, I asked, as not wanting the food to get cold is understandable, and this was going to be a good fare. He didn't immediately respond, so I kept driving.

After a few blocks, he started grumbling that I had to stop trying to fuck him over and take him to 183rd and Halsey. I was confused, and told him that I thought he wanted me to take him to Stark, and that I didn't see how I was fucking him over at all. "Stop disrespecting me, motherfucker," he said (and several other things in this vein) and some incoherent barkings about not spilling food. I pulled over and told him (not so cheerily, but still politely, in my "talking sternly to small children or drunk people voice") that it was okay for him to eat in the cab, and that I hadn't in any way tried to disrespect him, but that if he yelled at me again or called me names again, I was going to pull over and throw him out of the cab. I asked him if he understood, and he told me to just take him home.

I started driving, and he continued to mumble things. I made out a "motherfucker," and asked him if he'd said something. No response. "I thought so," I said, and kept driving. After about ten more blocks, he made a comment about stupid motherfucking white boys, and I pulled over and told him to get the fuck out of the cab. He continued to sit there, and said that he'd like to see me try and get him out of the cab, that I need to just keep driving. I told him that I'd made it clear I'd give him the boot if he was rude again, and that he had to get out. "Keep driving" he said, "I've got money and I'll tip you, motherfucker." "Get the FUCK out of the cab," I replied.

It went on like this for maybe a minute, until he told me to call the police, that he'd like to see me call the police as he'd whup my ass before they got there. This was actually something that had already crossed my mind (for numerous reasons, bodily throwing a crippled man out of my cab and onto the sidewalk at 109th & Stark wasn't something I was willing to do), and I pushed the voice button to talk to my dispatcher, and dialed the cops. As I was reaching for the cab's radio, I noticed him swinging a punch out of the corner of my, and pulled back out of the cab, the blow glancing off the side of my head.

"You either get the fuck out of the cab or sit and behave yourself!" I yelled.

"Pussy bitch motherfucker" etc.

I made another attempt to talk to my dispatcher (of course the cops were busy), and he grabbed at my shirt and tried to grab me about the throat. I turned, punched him (rather weakly, due to the seat between us) in the face, and stuck my thumb in his eye until he backed off. This got me some time to explain things to my dispatcher, who got the cops on their way.

I just stood outside the cab waiting for the cops to show, as the man refused to get out of it and continued to sit in the backseat yelling about what a pussy I was. After a couple minutes he got out to throw his food at me, bait me some more, and try to fight me. This was really just kind of sad and pathetic, because he couldn't stand or walk without keeping a hand on the car to balance himself. Whenever he made a lunge at me, I just walked calmly to the other side of the car, and he couldn't reach me.

His eagerness to fight was just really puzzling to me. I tend toward the scrawny end of the spectrum, but our brief tussle earlier had shown pretty clearly that I would be able to beat the shit out of him if I decided to do so. I'm not trying to make myself sound tough here - a drunk cripple is just never going to stand much of a chance against an able-bodied 26 year old man. I mean it was like me getting drunk and deciding that I wanted to beat the hell out of an NFL linebacker. Anyway, he kept yelling at me, and I kept telling him to chill out or leave, though toward the end I was starting to get annoyed enough that wailing on him for a bit and claiming self-defense didn't seem like that bad an idea, if for no other reason than to shut him up. But it was enough like the opening scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail without my indulging him.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to break out the camera phone for this occasion, so there's nothing to commemorate it.

A smoking-hot (the most stunningly beautiful woman I've seen in a long time, actually) blonde cop, and some standard-issue fat guys with shaved heads and goatees showed up after two or three minutes. I explained the situation to them, and they asked me what I wanted to happen. I told them that the incident had been annoying enough already, that dealing with pressing charges and whatnot would totally ruin my night, and that I didn't care what happened so long as the guy was gone. I assume/hope the pigs took him to detox, which was what needed to happen. I gave them my contact information, they gave me $20 out of his wallet, and I went back to work.

Financially, the night ended up sucking for a Saturday. I made more on Monday (though Monday was the best non-weekend night I've ever had), but again it was still more than many drivers made tonight, and I got a late start to boot. The cab had a CD player, which is always nice. Whole lot of Ghostface bumping in the whip, but not enough trips to the suburbs or airport. I think I was within Portland city limits all night long.

Another boring night

2006-07-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

Another night that was about as average as could possibly be, no titillating stories of note. Some Canadians asked about prostitutes, and I drove a Nigerian engineer at Intel who went on and on about how he hated working the same 12 hour graveyard shift as me, and expressed every social frustration I feel about my job. He didn't tip.

My cab sucked: no City of Portland taxi permit, so I couldn't really work downtown (which is not a big deal, as I often purposely avoid taking calls there anyway). In addition, this cab had no stereo, no TaxiCam, and a broken driver's seatbelt. Bad fuel efficiency, too. The lack of a radio wasn't as maddening as before, as I've now largely adjusted to my reduced cigarette diet (there's no longer any point in referring to myself as having quit, as I seem to be averaging about .75 cigarettes a day in the past week and a half). Still, this was not a good car. All-in-all though, it was neither a good nor bad Friday. Just another night at the office. I'd tell an old story to compensate, but I need to wake up in six and a half hours if I want to work tonight.

Another Cabbie

2006-06-30T06:16:00.000-07:00

You don't really know a man until you've driven two hundred miles in his cab. After tonight I feel like I know R.

R. is 72 inches tall and weighs 230 lbs. He's almost 47 years old. He owns the day half of a Crown Victoria with a little bit more than 150,000 miles on it. The company owns the night half. This may very well mean that no one will partner with R. because of any number of potential personality defects, or it may simply mean that he's not interested in owning a full cab and new night owners have just happened to buy into other ones.

But R.'s cab is special. He has two labels posted on the instrument panel so that lease drivers can understand how special his cab is. It can only have Premium Fuel put in it, for one. There is also another label that reminds lease drivers (who are well-known to be idiots) to "Wash EVERY Shift."

Another special thing about R.'s cab is that the doors in the rear won't open from the inside, even if the child locks are turned off (though he keeps them on, just in case). It's just like a real cop car! Isn't that neat? You bet it is! That he left the doors in this state after purchasing the car from the police is an indication that R. is:

a) incredibly paranoid about people running out on him without paying
and/or
b) incredibly cheap
and/or
c) really keen on being a gentleman and opening doors for people

R. also doesn't like to be photographed. Another special feature of R.'s cab is that a rubber band holds a business card in place over the camera that points at the driver's side of the vehicle. While crueler members of the readership may assume that this has something to do with the fact that he's as every bit as ugly as you'd expect a cabbie of his age and dimensions to be, it's more likely related to another special feature of R.'s cab - when you pull down the driver's sunvisor to see if there are credit card slips (there are not), you get hit in the head with a pack of Camel filters. The business card over the camera likely means that R. is paranoid about someone spying on him (they aren't) and catching him smoking (for numerous reasons, they probably can't). It also means that R. probably does not understand how the taxi cam works (which is not something I'll elaborate on in this space for numerous reasons, but it's fairly simple).

But despite several signs of paranoia, R. still likes life on the edge. This is attested to by the fact that his car doesn't have an air bag in it, and also by the dent and scrape up by the passenger side headlight. Further evidence of R.'s taste for life on the edge is found in his glove box, where he has a VHS tape labeled "Death Hunt 1981 Charles Bronson" that was likely recorded off the television (or is in fact not "Death Hunt", but instead pornography).

R. is just one of the many wonderful people I work with, and after boring work nights I will perhaps start featuring more Profiles in Cab-driving.

I'm NOT a Pimp

2006-06-29T04:55:00.000-07:00

As usual, no work for me on Tuesday and Wednesday night. I went camping, which was nice in that the mosquitoes provided me with an excuse to carry on like someone with Tourette's (what with all the random bursts of profanity, often arranged in non-sensical ways). Also, as I told my friends on the way there, "I'm most excited about going camping because I know that there won't be any prostitutes at Buck Lake."

I've had like ten times as many interactions with prostitutes since I started this job than I did in the entirety of my life before then. Most of these interactions consist of a woman waving at me, me pulling up, her asking me if I "want to do a date" or if she can make some money, and me saying "no" and driving off. Occasionally, they're with a john or have money, and I drive them someplace.

On Monday night, I got a call to pick up at a weird complex in Northeast that has like two strip clubs, a taqueria, and a porn shop in the same strip mall, with a weird checkered flag and pink neon exterior design scheme. I was happy that a woman came out, as the dancers at this place have always given me good tips, often very good tips (strictly monetary ones).

This one's going to 13th & Belmont, a nice fare. I ask her how her night went, and she says not very good. She'd had a mix-up with another club where she dances, a really classy place out in Beaverton where she'd tried to call in sick but hadn't heard back from then, so she'd gone out there, but then they told her that they thought she wasn't coming so had called someone else, etc... Anyway, she went to the place I picked her up at so she could make some money. But the past two nights she hasn't been able to make money, the other girls had been doing disgusting shit and under-cutting her. And they were fat, and had nasty pussies to boot.

I ask her how that works, and she explains to me that it's because the two places in Northeast "in my opinion aren't strip clubs, they're brothels." I'd heard rumors before, but never from someone who'd actually been in there, certainly not someone who worked there. She breaks it down for me - they don't serve alcohol, so they aren't regulated by the OLCC. There's a pole and a stage, but the real business is "shows." Men pay $150, and they go in a room with the girls with a couch, a towel, and speakers playing the country music from the main room. And they have sex with the girls. The girl gets $100, the club gets $50.

I ask her why she dances at such a scuzzy place when she's got gigs at two much nicer places, and she tells me that she makes better money there. "Yeah, so I'm a prostitute" she says, matter of factly, which surprises me as she's been talking condescendingly about "the other girls." It's also somewhat disconcerting for me to be talking to a prostitute who isn't patently insane, yelling, or trying to get my business. "I'm a prostitute with morals" she explains - she doesn't try to make more money by cutting guys price breaks to get more business, that's just gross.

I ask her how she got into it, and she tells me how she used to dance at a place downtown when she was 18, and one night one of the customers was constantly complaining about how the girls at the place in Northeast let him touch them, let him do this and that... So she started to wonder what this place out in Northeast was, and she went to check it out once and saw that the girls were making lots of money and seemed to be having a good time. So she started working there, though she didn't start doing anything illegal until she'd been working there about six months.

She's barely 21 now, and she's gorgeous even without make-up on, in her sweatshirt and pony-tail. She sounds so frustrated by her position, so trapped. As I pull up in front of her place, I want to turn around and tell her that she has so many other options, that she's young and pretty and a lot more reasonable and perceptive than half the people I deal with, than a good 95% of the strippers, that she absolutely, positively, does not have to be doing this.

Instead, I tell her that it's $17. She only gives me a dollar for a tip. As she gets out, I tell her to take care of herself. I am not a social worker, and I sense that she already knows all of this, and knows that I know it too. The vibe I've gotten from her is very much that she just wanted to tell someone how unhappy she was, not that she wanted a lecture. And I don't have any experience in helping women transition out of prostitution, etc., etc.

I still don't know if I did the right thing.

Anyway, the way she explained the business to me, I really want to use its name here, because I was just totally disgusted by it. But as a cab driver, if a fare asks me to take them to a brothel, and I do, I can be arrested for pimping. I assume that would transfer to passing along the location of a brothel on the internet, even if it was done in scorn. I guess I could call the pigs, but the cops here are so insane and so unpleasant, and they already (from the woman's account) know about the place, and none of the girls wants to be responsible for the place getting closed. I'd certainly hate it if the whole cab company went under because some drivers let shady shit go down in their cabs, so I can understand that.

And no, it wasn't until a good three hours later that I realized how close to Travis Bickle land I'd come for a few minutes. As my reasonable, female, future schoolteacher friend told me while camping, it's not my responsibility to save other people from the consequences of decisions they made themselves. Especially if they don't ask for my help.

I Didn't Use the AK

2006-06-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

Last night was just wonderful on every possible level, one of the nights when driving a cab brings true joy to both my heart and my wallet. But what made it so exciting is, again, a bunch of minutiae and/or a long story.

So a story about a customer, then. My third to last fare was around 4am, picked-up at a residence in Inner Southeast. I was beaming, nearing the end of a wonderful night, and asked the white woman in her late 20s how her night had been.

"Horrible," was the reply. She tends bar during the daytime. Today, a man came in while she was at the back of the bar by their lottery machine. He handed her a lottery ticket, pointed a gun at her, and told her to take the ticket and give him all the money in the till. She did, $1200. After dealing with the cops, she got shitfaced drunk, had a huge argument with her husband, and then found herself waking up on her friends' couch. So she called us, shaken and needing to get back home to her family.

Having a gun pointed at me is my greatest fear. It's not something I think about often, not something that I could think about often (or necessarily should worry too much about in this town), but I'm in an extremely vulnerable position. I wear a seat-belt, and am often too busy monitoring traffic and the MDT to keep an eye on the person in the backseat. Hell, I even keep my rear view mirror in a position where I can actually see traffic, not the passenger. I could be cold-cocked, stabbed, or shot before I had the slightest idea of what I'd like to occur.

Of course, it would be monumentally stupid to do any of those things while I was actually driving the car, and I do take measures to protect myself and humanize myself as much possible. But none of that changes the ultimate fact that I spend my entire shift strapped into a seat with my back to someone, and that any of those someones could potentially be stupid, desperate, or greedy enough to come after me.

I should note here, for the benefit of my no-doubt worrying mother, that I have yet to meet a cab-driver who's been robbed. I've spoken to a very few who've had close calls, and one who had to deal with a guy who had a stun-gun. I trust my intelligence, my mouth, and my training, though. I have to, really.

Anyhow, I gave the bartender a skate on the $12 - only the second time I've happily and willingly done that for someone I didn't know. She insisted on giving me $5, which, of course, I kept.

A Good Story

2006-06-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had a trip that exemplified the kind of boring story that's fantastic to other cabbies:

"I pick up an incredibly drunk Hispanic man at Exotica around 7:45, and he wanted to go to Beaverton. "Nice," I think. Then we get there, and he only has a hundred and a twenty, and it's $36 on the meter. I can't change that this early in the night, so he goes up to get his friend. The friend offers me a $50, but then they decide that they want to go back to Columbia Blvd to get the first guy's truck. "Hell yeah," I think, and get on the freeway. Then no, it's 82nd & Columbia - even better. Then it's 82nd & Division. Ends up being $73 on the meter, no tip, but who even cares at that point? I gave them my card, but when they called back I was driving some douche who told me he was going to Tualatin, so I told them to call dispatch. Then the douche tells me to go to the Holiday Inn by the Airport, and we're at 82nd and Stark already, so it only ends up being a $18 with the tip."

This is almost a word-for-word account of what I told E. at the end of my shift after I bummed a cigarette from him (I have decided that a single cigarette at the end of a Saturday night shift is permissible - I know, it's a slippery slope). Mind you, neither of the Hispanic guys said much of anything or did anything crazy, and the Holiday Inn guy was also quite boring. Yet E. was rightly riveted, as this brief and unelaborate story covers almost all of the genres of shop-talk-at-the-garage stories: a good trip coming out of a place with a reputation for lousy ones, drunk people making unexplainable decisions, lots of money, not getting tipped, and a missed opportunity. This would have been the cabbie ur-story if one of the Hispanic guys had puked, the other had taken his pants off, and the guy who went to the Holiday Inn had run out of the cab without paying.

Not on the List

2006-06-24T04:19:00.000-07:00

I didn't work last night, I showed up at the garage too late and there were 28 names on the "extras" list - no cab for me. I could've hung around for a few hours to hear this officially, and then been assigned a cab for Saturday night. This is what I normally do in such a situation, but I just took off today. That's one thing about being a lease driver without a steady - you only work when you want to, but sometimes you want to and can't. C'est la vie.

I was a bit of a tease yesterday, so I might as well go ahead and tell the story about the woman who stiffed me. I picked her up out front of the trailer park at 84th & Flavel, and she was pretty scary. White, mid-20s, shorts and a halter top. But her face, chest, and upper arms were covered in weird scabs. Like incredibly nasty acne, but not. Not psoriasis as I've seen it before, but perhaps a variation, or extreme eczema. What I thought, though, was meth geek.

She had me take her to some apartments by the Clackamas Town Center. Not a particularly good or bad fare - about $8. On the drive there she told me all about how she works two jobs, one tending bar and the other as an R.N. at an Alzheimer's hospice. Only gets 2 hours of sleep a night. And on top of that she's got cancer. We had a pretty good and friendly conversation, given how depressing the subject matter was.

When we got to the apartments, she told me that she'd have to run inside to get the money, and that I could hold her credit card while she did so. I agreed, and she walked around the side of the building. I waited for five minutes, and began to get a bad feeling. Then I looked at the card she gave me. The first name was "Debrah," and the name on the MDT and the name she'd used with me was "Jessica." I waited five more minutes (I had a good comic book), gave up, and ran the card. Declined, of course.

You be the cabbie: Identify my several mistakes (both in judgment and in practice) that could have either prevented this situation or mitigated its negative impact in lost time and money.

It's Tricky...

2006-06-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

I had a good car last night: 15 mpg (very good for one of the old Crown Vics), only about 148k miles (again, very good), PLUS - satellite radio and a CD player.

I didn't have a very good night in terms of the money I made. If not for three good runs, I would've been up a creek. But still, I took a couple very worthwhile hours off to run home and grab CDs, and then hang out with one of my favorite people in the world (who I hadn't seen in months). In the time I actually worked, I netted $15 an hour, which is still much better than my last job. And the whole original point for my taking this one was the freedom it affords me to work as often as I want and as hard as I want - a freedom that I haven't been taking much advantage of.

Anyway, I suppose that for the purposes of this blog, it would be most appropriate for me to talk at this point about my first fare, her (likely false) sob story, the maddening way in which she stiffed me, and how that almost ruined my night. But in all honesty, it's just not very interesting to me right now. I will say that it makes it easier for everyone when people who stiff cabbies just cut and run. I mean really, you don't need to serve me some elaborate deception - the woman tonight, for example, wasted a perfectly good prop she could have used to more nefarious and profitable effect than getting out of a $13 cab ride...

Anyway, maybe it's just the good mood that the CD player put me in, but the stories that leap out at me about tonight are getting a guy that I also had on Monday, who goes up to around Council Crest, my favorite park in a city rightfully famous for its parks. On the way down the hill (a very fun ride, especially in an old cop car), I was blasting Mike Patton & Odd Nosdom's "11th Ave Freakout Pt. 2" and just had a huge smile on my face.

My next trip after that was an airporter from out of deep southwest Sellwood - about as far away from the airport as you can get while still being on Portland's eastside. A very nice bourgeois white family on their way to their summer vacation on the east coast. $37 on the meter and a "keep the change" when Dad paid with a $50. Good, wholesome, and enjoyable conversation, and a gorgeous view of St. Helens at dawn from the Markam Bridge. They even liked Mountains, which just tickled me.

I had another guy who was really digging Brian Anderegg. One woman loved Shogun Kunitoki and forced her phone number on me. A couple people liked Themselves, same with cLOUDDEAD. It always makes me happy when people in the cab dig my music, because I'm always really paranoid that they'll be completely turned off by psychedelic Japanese harmonium bands, avant-garde hip-hop, or electro-acoustic drones and tip me less. Not a single complaint tonight, though, and several "wow, this is awesome"s. Thank God Portland's the city it is.

Drove into the garage listening to Midnight Marauders for the first time in probably over a year. Phife Dawg would still like you all to know that he like his beats "hard, like two day old shit."