THE STUTTERER'S STEW: FROM CHAPTER VII: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

A LONG-SHOT, AT BEST

"I guess nothing ever works for us. we’re fools of course--
bucking the inside plus a 15 percent take,
but how are you going to tell a dreamer
there’s a 15 percent take on the
dream? he’ll just laugh and say,
is that all?..."
--CHARLES BUKOWSKI


In the program, we had learned the concept: “Act As If,” which meant that even if you don’t “feel” something positive, “act as if” you do and that positive feeling will eventually assimilate into your being. So, as I dragged my bag, and ass, up 43rd Street to Madison Avenue, in the sweltering New York City heat, I “acted as if” I was “cool,” strong, directed, and assertive. I kept fingering the thirty-five cents I had in my pocket, lest I should lose it.
Sweat had begun to pour off me by the time the bus came. I deposited the thirty-five cents and took a seat between two sweating people. Without air conditioning, you had the discomfort of sticking to their flesh as you tried to slide between them. I looked around at the people riding with me. I knew no one, yet I knew them all. I imagined I carried the stigma of being an X-addict. I felt I had a huge X in the middle of my forehead. I looked at my bag of clothes, the track marks on my arms, and thought of another Project Return slogan: “Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.”
Diane lived on the top floor of a brownstone in a once quiet, but now fashionable section of the city, on Madison Avenue between 91st and 92nd Street. The burgundy carpet and wood banisters were aged, the carpet shorn, the wood banisters scarred and burnished; the stairs smelled musty as memories crept through my nose, as I climbed up the five flights. If this was new, what was old?
Diane was nervously skittering around the apartment when I opened the door. She was very obviously trying to busy herself and not think too much about what was to come next. It was the kind of moment that I’d had all too often where the distance between me and a person I loved was represented by ice, so thin, that the slightest weight upon it would cause fissures and breaks. They’d begin from the core and spread, web-like, to the parameters of the frozen water. I would, with a certain amount of excited trepidation, place my foot gently upon the surface until the first sound birthed from my heel preceding my toes’ rupture of form. It’s interesting to note that I loved both the crunch and the squiggles of aborted lines my weight produced.
She turned around when she heard me enter. Her hands fluttered to her face and made a gesture of welcome, while her smile belied the apprehension in her heart. She was far too well schooled and gracious to allow another to feel her misgivings and doubt. I dropped my bag and went to her, took her face in my hands, and kissed her. There are many things you try to do in any given kiss. This kiss had too many messages. Trying to simplify, and perhaps obscure, what those messages were, I led her into the bedroom and said, “I told you I was going to get a pass this weekend.” We made love in the summer heat for what seemed like a long time. It was very hot, and we perspired freely. Spent, we lay there and allowed the air to cool our bodies.
She had an old brass bed, fluffed with lace and pillows. We ate our tuna fish sandwiches and drank coffee on it. It tasted like the most exotic fare to me. I smoked a cigarette while we listened to Miles play with Trane, Bye Bye Blackbird. I felt I had gone to heaven. We showered, dressed and went for a walk on Fifth Avenue. The sense of freedom I had was intoxicating. It was one of those rare times when I could laugh simply because someone had thin legs, or dressed in the most incongruous way, and children looked astonished slurping ice cream cones which dripped on their shirts, which were splattered with chocolate, strawberry and dirt which now looked like a Pollock painting. My dick got hard because a breeze blew against my pants or the material against it aroused me. My nipples grew erect because the fingers that nestled in the crook of my arm belonged to someone who was just in my bed and I’d brought the bed outside, and it moved with me. I thought we made a fine couple. We were nearly the same height, our hips moved together, bumping and grinding, while my arm went around her back and my hand rested casually on that wonderful space, her hour-glassed curve, between her hip and rump. She’d say that she should have been born during the Victorian period. Her body and spirit told her so.
She said that she felt we were “soul-mates” destined to return as brother and sister. I gave her a copy of Cocteau’s, Les Enfants Terribles, which served to excite her and prove her point. I had a few misgivings. That kind of intimacy unnerved me. In fact, “intimacy” was something I wanted only on my own terms. I moved closer, or further away, at my discretion only. Should the other person ask for, much less demand, more of me in ways that I could not easily define, or made me uncomfortable, I was usually, and quickly, “in the wind.” What dictated my ability to get closer to another human being, in this case a woman, was need, most often my own. A neurotics dream is always empty. It cannot be filled by anything tangible. I can remember many months from where we are now in this story, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, after having made love to Diane, I lit a cigarette and called either my father or Julio, the founder of Project Return, about some inconsequential bullshit. After I hung up the phone she said to me, “Why after we make love do you have to call a man up?”
I looked at her a bit dumbfounded and replied, “I don’t know. I never thought about that before.”
“Well, maybe you should. Maybe you should think about it.”
I looked down at the floor, not really wanting to meet her eyes. An anger, born out of embarrassment, crept up around my chest, and I felt my face flushing. I took a drag off my cigarette and tried to think of a way to squirm out of her apartment. I didn’t think of that moment until I began writing this book. Prior to that afternoon, Diane, because of who she was, tried to possess me in ways that I simply was not ready for and, in fact, frightened the shit out of me. I was tethered to invisible entities. I could not articulate that then and did not have the faintest notion of that truth. What I did know was that Diane and I were just beginning to know each other without the cushioned barrier that narcotics supplied. In these last fifteen years, I have seen more relationships end because one partner stopped using the drug or drinking the booze that either started or solidified the union. Consequently, much of the behavior, attitudes, and needs that attenuate that lifestyle ceases. The union, in essence, is worse than new. It is now without the old comforts that memory suggests. Life without the anesthetic is a motherfucker. Lois Wilson, the wife of Bill Wilson who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, is known to have said, “Giving up drinking is easy; it’s life that’s hard.”
We returned to her apartment near sunset. The sunlight coming into her windows had that blood red glow as it washed over the room. I sat in the kitchen and watched Diane brew some tea. “Norman, do you think you really did the right thing by leaving?” she asked with her back to me.
“I do, yes, emphatically, yes,” I quickly responded.
“You don’t think you should have...”
“No, I don’t. Don’t worry, I know what I’m going to do. I thought of it while we were walking,” I lied. I felt it would come to me any second.
She turned around to face me, waiting for an answer. I tried to buy some time by patting my knee for her to come and sit in my lap. She obliged. I put my arm around her waist and cupped the underside of her breast. “Don’t start,” she said, and laughed. “You don’t know what the Hell you’re going to do, do you?”
I looked up into her face, smiled and shook my head. She bent down to where my face was and kissed me softly on the lips.
“Don’t panic,” I said trying to sound upbeat and confident, “whatever you do, don’t panic. We’re going to get through this weekend just fine. We’ll go out, eat something, see a movie, come back, get The Times and boom, it’s Sunday. Sunday, we’ll go for a walk get something to eat, maybe see another movie; keep busy, ya know? We’ll keep busy and then it’s Monday. Monday I’ll go see my uncle and borrow some money, maybe a hundred and get a hack license. I’ll drive a cab. I need a job right away and that’s the quickest and easiest thing I can think of doing, plus I make a couple of bucks in tips everyday and can start paying my own freight...how does that sound?”
“Whew! You can really bullshit when the chips are down, can’t you?”
“Part of my charm. It goes with that envious blues feeling.”
She got up and I slipped my hand under her dress. She gave me one of those “you got to be kidding” looks.
“Hey, without the dope my dick’s like a propeller.”
“Polanski’s movie just opened today, The Tenant. We can eat at that little Italian place that we like and go to an early show.”
“Polanski? Sounds good to me.”
“Maybe you can shut down the engine for a few hours or fly on automatic pilot?”
“Coupla hours? I can do that on my head.”

Monday morning I went to a cab company on Eleventh Avenue and 60th Street to inquire if they’d sponsor me for a hack license. You needed a company’s signature to get the process moving. I saw the shape of some of the other potential employees who joined me. It seemed they’d sponsor a dead person if they thought they could drive. At that time, a beginning driver got 47% of the meter for the first six months plus tips. This was still a time in New York City when, even owners, were somewhat human. My next stop was Uncle Stretch, a relative I never liked much.
Stretch became a very wealthy man after he turned forty. A frustrated actor, ladies man, and bon vivant, he reminded me of Willie Loman’s brother in Death of a Salesman. Stretch went into the real estate jungle, bit some flesh, nibbled the edges of legitimacy, got the right people drunk, or laid, or both, and came out a rich man. He never let you forget it either. Although he never let you forget much of anything, even when he was poor. “You O.K. kid?” he asked as I walked in. I knew he knew I was no longer in the program. I was no longer somebody else’s problem.
“Yeah, Stretch, I’m fine,” I replied, the words sticking in my craw. When I didn’t like someone, it was real hard to ask them for anything, not impossible, just hard.
“What can I do for you?”
“You can lend me a hundred ‘til I get a hack license.”
He eyed me suspiciously and said, “You sure it’s for that?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“No fuckin’ around?”
“Hey Stretch, if I was fuckin’ around I wouldn’t have come to you, would I? So, please, don’t make me feel like a schmuck. I’m askin’ you for a hundred when I know you’re carrying a lot more than that, and, if I’d asked you for more, you’d give it to me.”
He took out a roll from his pocket, peeled off two fifties and handed them to me. “Can I buy you lunch?”
“Gimme another hundred and I’ll buy you lunch.”
As he was laughing, I turned around and left saying, “Thank you,” over my shoulder.
I went to Long Island City to go through the process for my interim license, a written test and physical examination.
The written test was a breeze: Where’s the Empire State Building? (sticking out your ass, I thought) and other toughies like that. I was a little worried about the physical though. My arms hadn’t completely healed and there was the matter of my diabetes. I decided to hope, and lie. Fortunately, the doctor was young when Broadway was a prairie. He never looked at my arms, and when he asked if I had any of this or that, I just did what Nancy Reagan advised, “Just Say No.” They stamped a few papers, I paid a fee and went back to the cab company. The dispatcher told me I could begin the next day. I had a job.
I chose the early shift: In by 7 a.m. off at 4. I drove a Checker cab. It was fun in the city and shook like a sonofabitch on the highway, but even that was a hoot. In even the best of circumstances, dealing with the public is hard, but dealing with the public in scorching, humid, New York City traffic, where the pollution and heat are beyond belief can, at times, be suicidal. On the other hand, driving again was a kick, and some passengers were eccentric and/or interesting, and somehow it gets to be 3:30 and you put on your “Off Duty” sign and made it in. Your shirt was soaked, the passengers have blurred into a stew of shoulders and faces, but there’s money in your pocket and you’re on your way home. You’ve worked, and worked hard. There’s a sense of accomplishment, and money in your pocket to prove it.
I was smarter this time around. I was more protective of myself. That first week I called Julio in his office. He took my call and registered his disappointment but told me to come by or call anytime if I felt the need. It reassured me that the president of the program told me not to be a stranger. It wasn’t like white, money hungry Areba, who had to have a deposit before saying “Hello.” I walked through Central Park listening to the thumping rhythm of conga players and smelling the sweet aroma of boo.

Compulsion to me, in large measure, is seduction, and being seduced, is very pleasurable, even if the end result is misery and pain. If I were given a penicillin shot as a kid and had had an allergic reaction to it that brought me very close to death, or had nearly dried up all my tear ducts, as so often happens, I doubt I would fantasize about my next injection, but I’ll be goddamned if I don’t walk by a liquor store, or drug store, or hospital, and don’t stare a little too long at the displays in the window, or wonder what kind of prescription the person in front of me is filling, or think about all those lovely medications that are inside the confines of locked cabinets in hospitals. Even the simple act of lighting a cigarette can be fraught with seduction. The smell of burning sulfur, after the match is struck, reminds me of cooking up dope. At the beginning, when you’re clean from drugs, everything, or nearly everything, reminds you of when you were getting high: the streets you walk down, the connections on the corners and in houses, neighborhoods, times of day when you usually scored, episodes of eluding cops and muggers, routes that you took going to and coming from. Manhattan was one network of subterfuge. And you miss that too; you miss the drama. But Diane didn’t miss that drama and had a hard time understanding why I did. What she (and I) didn’t know is how much I was drawn to a life of fantasy; how even the love between two people, when stripped of its most fevered and childlike dimensions, implies work.
I really didn’t want to think about too much except getting up in the morning and driving a cab and staying away from drugs, which didn’t include alcohol.
I should say, that at this juncture in my life I didn’t include alcohol as a drug, hence a substance to avoid using. In fact, Therapeutic Communities gave those they were treating, ”drinking privileges” when they, at a certain point, demonstrated behavior and took on responsibilities that clearly indicated their commitment to drug and/or narcotic abstinence which preceded their reentry into society. Even the federal and state governments in funding treatment programs made a strict delineation between alcoholics and drug addicts, never equating the two. Today, however, those agencies are aligned to a great extent and, even in some quarters, given equal billing. Therapeutic Communities these days no longer give drinking privileges and, in fact, strongly suggest that their graduates attend AA and/or NA meetings.
It was enough for me to get up in the morning, go to work, come home and be with Diane. I needed my life to be simple and she was complicating it, goddamn her. She wanted to get married. She must be crazy, I said to myself but to her I said, “Now’s not the time.” I was so conscious about slipping back into the abyss of addiction that I talked about drugs all the time. So much so, it must have seemed to Diane as if I was still using and, in that regard, I still was. I was caught in the fear that only those who have rewired their neural networks understand and, in a perverse way, have come to love. But, marriage!? Christ, it scared the shit out of me. I knew, or thought I had an inkling of what her motivations or anxieties were, and in a pique of righteous outrage, did not care to talk about much less consider them. I asked her what the rush was. I asked her to give me some time to ground myself. In the moments that it takes to get a thought fleshed out, I ran a few hundred scenarios through my mind that sprung from fear and need. I didn’t want to lose her, and I needed a place to stay. I wanted to negotiate this, stall for time, make her see my side and join me there; anything, but make a decision. Besides, as long as I was staying clean, working and taking care of myself physically, I was doing a hell of a good job for both of us, I righteously felt. Also, the fact that I was not fooling around with anyone else should be enough to signify my commitment to her. Well, some days it was, and some days it wasn’t. She too had her own time table. In those days, I hated those who had a different schedule than my own. I wanted every person, every star, planet, organism, and god, secular or heavenly, to understand and conform to my needs, especially when I thought they were so humble and virtuous. It turns my stomach to say it, but I was something of a misguided idiot when it came to putting my values, my ideas, my desires, my needs, my my my what a jerk I could be. Diane would have to cope with her anxieties the same way I was, alone. It mattered not one iota that it was she who stuck by me, fed me, housed me, and tried to understand me. The poet in me said to her, “I’ve got nothing, and I want to share it with you,” and she loved me for that. I had not come to the point in my thinking, or had yet realized and understood, that although we are alone with our share of pain, loneliness, confusion and fear, a union of two can, if strong, provide a sanctuary, a hedge against the war that is fought within and without.
When reasonably healthy, there wasn’t a grateful bone in my body. In fact, I could be, and in many instances was, a first class prick. I didn’t feel myself as “needy;” I felt like I had my balls back; and I was frisky. I probably scared the hell out of Diane. The more independent I felt, the more I distanced myself from her. Like a child, curious with his own image, and entranced by the spaces around him, I felt the need to explore. We had reached that point where arguments--a carousel of angry horses--were as predictable as death, with language, simmering with accusations, anger, and the bluish black hue of gangrene: “You did this, so I did that.” “Well, I only did that because you already had done this.” “I wouldn’t have done that if only you were listening to me, but you really wanted to do that anyway, so be honest.” “That’s a lie; you’re just lying.” “Shut up already, just shut up.”
“Can’t we have a conversation?” she’d say, “can’t we ever talk?”
“This ain’t talking, this is finger pointing time and I ain’t gonna buy into it. I’m getting out of here.”
“That’s just like you. You never stay around long enough to resolve anything. Either you leave, or just stop talking.”
When I knew she was right I had no stomach to fight. I had an inclination to run. I have always thought that the truth was very much like answers: over rated. A person is only able to deal with certain things at certain times. Anything else, overloads the circuits. We had a stalemate, but a stalemate to me meant looking for an out, not another game with the same player. I still did not have the capacity to work with, and through, the net of lace and steel that constitute the filaments of another person. And so we fought and made love; fought some more and made love. It began getting too crazy, frustrating, and threatening for me. I called Julio and made an appointment.

“Well, what do you want to do?” he asked me, a Marlboro pursed in his lips, underneath his neatly trimmed mustache.
“Split,” I answered.
“Where?” he inquired. I could see light dancing in his eyes.
“Shit, I don’t know man, that’s why I came to see you.”
“Well brother, you can’t live me with. I love you dearly, you know that, but shit, Linda would have my balls. She has them anyway, but I spoke with your father...”
“Yeah?” my ears pricked up.
“You know, he can use you now. He lost a lot of bread with that store in Queens, man. He needs someone he can trust. Not forever, but for now. How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t know, man,” I replied, but I lied. I wanted to go home. I wanted to get away from Diane. I wanted to prove I wasn’t such a fuck-up to him, with him.
Julio, besides being a superb administrator, was, without formal training, a brilliant clinician when it came to the drug addicted. He read me like a book, but he knew how a decision needed to be arrived at independently. He let me digest the desire, feel the fear, and assimilate the emotions. Then he said, “I think you can handle it. Besides, I think it would be good for you in a variety of ways. You’ll be busy from morning to night, and he’s smarter now and understands more about you and himself. You understand more too about your shit and his. And brother, workin’ for him “straight” would relieve some that fucking “guilt” you feel.” He paused then continued, “I’ll call him.”
I went back and sheepishly told Diane. It wasn’t easy. She saw me as another man leaving her. I told her that it wasn’t so. It just meant I was going back home for awhile to try to build a better foundation than driving a cab could provide. We’d still see each other as often as we could, but staying like we were would only disrupt our relationship further, possible destroy it. I didn’t want to do that and neither did she.
“One day you’re going to have to stay someplace, with someone, long enough to work out and through the difficulties,” she said.
“I know, I know,” I replied, but I really didn’t know and couldn’t really hear what she was saying. I had one foot out the door and the other foot in Brooklyn. She didn’t stay while I was packing.

pgs 99-105: From Chapter VII--JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

TAXI !!!--

CHAPTER I


It’s a noble thing to drive a cab in New York City, unless you happen to be the one doing it. You haven’t really lived until you line up next to Hajjii and Sheik, Dominico, Lesbetina, and the rest of the world’s poor and beleaguered. They understood, as only the poor do, that they had to work twelve hour days, six or seven days a week, without falling down dead in order to survive the day to day, week to week, month to month, American grind; thinking in years, well, was unthinkable.
The smells of goat meat, red beans swimming in an unknowable meat mixture, and what might be some illegally fresh killed rooster, floated around my head as I waited for a cab to be assigned to me. Each of my fellow drivers held cell phones, and most were on them already, though their conversations at four fifteen in the morning were a mystery to me. Most things in this life had remained a mystery to me.
Here I was, a few years past sixty, parts of my body dead or in the process of dying, trying to summon up enough strength to turn the key in the ignition and get on with the day.
“Fortune!” the man behind the raised glass partition bellowed.
“Yeah, here, right here.”
“You drew her again, Fortune, ol’ number thirteen,” he said. He looked down at me and smiled. I could see the stain of a hundred thousand cigarettes and decades of bad dental care.
“Christ, that shit box is falling apart; you give me that car every goddamn time you’re on. Why is that? You got a hardon for me, or what?”
“Figure it out, Fortune. You want the keys or not?” He started to sing, Come Rain Or Come Shine: I’m gonna love ya, like nobody’s loved ya,... with as much gusto as he could summon. The others in the room barely noticed. Very few of them knew the song to begin with, but they, too, probably breathed a sigh of relief knowing that “ol’ number thirteen” had already been assigned to someone else.
I knew why Calloway, that mick cocksucker, gave me thirteen all the time: I didn’t grease him. I didn’t let any of the money I broke my ass earning, slip into his whiskey fingers. I knew most, if not all, of the other drivers, slipped him a few bucks, but I’d be goddamned if I’d give him a solitary cent. I’d rather die of bone cancer. I took the keys and the trip sheet from the mouth of the window, went over to a table, scribbled my name, social security number and hack license on it, then went into the darkness.
The fleet I was working for had about seventy cabs, but they never told you where any of them were parked. Your cab could either be in the lot--which was always highly doubtful--or anywhere on the block. It was especially fun when it rained.
You could no longer smoke in cabs, so I lit a cigarette once outside. I did better in 1972 when I first drove a Checker cab, and you could do just about anything in them. Back then you drove an eight hour day, got forty-nine percent of the meter, and all the tips you made. You just brought the cab back, filled out your trip log and split. You didn’t have to pay for gas, repairs, or anything else. Now, you had to buy shifts up front. You had to work either day on the weekends and any other shifts you chose. The tab was a hundred a day during the week, eighty-five on Saturday or Sunday, plus gas. The owners of the fleet pretended they were psychiatrists: you missed an appointment you paid regardless.
The weather was oppressive. My sneakers stuck to the sticky gravel and pebbles; pits the owners never bothered to fill as a result of rain, snow, traffic, or random killings. I scraped them off when I hit the street. My underarms had already begun to perspire.
New York City streets, even at this hour of the morning, still had a certain buzz to them. If you knew where to go, where the after hour clubbers and revelers never had enough, you’d make a couple of bucks between the hours of four and seven, when your regulars emerged.
“Hey Charlie, you lookin for thirteen?” our black mechanic said to me as I was crossing the street. He laughed and let loose a stream of spit from his mouth. He wore a black Fedora and a guinea t-shirt and greasy stained chinos held up by a pair of suspenders.
“What else, man?”
“She’s down the block, on the right. He sure stickin it right up your ass, man.”
“The only thing he’s gonna come out with is a hand full of shit. Maybe I’ll just kick his ass one day, just for the hell of it.”
“He nasty, that sonofabitch is.”
“So am I.”
I wasn’t nasty. I wasn’t near nasty. But you can’t tell too many people that. Besides, I’d grown up on the hard scrabble streets of Brooklyn, with a father who loved boxing and violence. I’d been no stranger to verbal intimidation and even though my first reaction was to choke and stew for a very long time, I’d erupted now and again. I’d also learned that your foes will either know or find out soon enough if you are to be feared or respected. Nobody had ever made another person or group cross the street because he was tough with his craft or his art.
“Have a good one,” was all Curtis said, as I shuffled off down the block. “You, too,” I called back over my shoulder as I made off to find my home for the next twelve hours. But it wasn’t really twelve hours. By the time you found your cab and began your day, until the time you had to bring her back, which usually shaved an hour off your shift, you really clocked ten hours and change. They had you by the balls.

My wife had me by the balls, too, even though she was no longer my wife. She cut out on me well over three years ago. “I can’t take it anymore,” was what she said. “I need to find out who the hell I am, but living with you and your problems, makes that impossible. I’m miserable. You’re miserable. We’re miserable. I’m going.” And she did. Quickly. But I still loved her. I thought about her constantly. There wasn’t a block I could go down, a corner I could turn, a morning, afternoon or evening that I didn’t think of the times we spent together and what she was doing now. I thought that driving a cab would help. To an extent it did. But there was a void in my chest that nothing would fill, and that was that.
I’d met her when she was a kid freshly arrived from Japan, with stars in her eyes and dreams in her heart. Over the course of many years living with me, I’m sure I’d extinguished quite a few of them.
When I’d seen that she was falling in love with me, I tried to tell her that this wouldn’t last. Our age difference was too large; I was too moody, too set in my ways, too much the fool, too many physical illnesses to fade, too many compulsions. But me, being the fool I am, let it go on. Let it go on--until I’d fallen madly in love with her.
Why don’t you eat my pussy? she asked me one evening. I looked up at her from the narcotic mist I’d been under for well over a year. I was taking legally prescribed percocets for a diabetic ulceration, but I had embellished just how much “pain” I was in, and was given an amount which far exceeded my needs, except my emotional ones.
Eat your pussy? I innocently asked. Well, it never crossed my mind.
Why not? I love how you eat my pussy. I love to cum when you eat my pussy. I know what you’re going through, but I’m going through hell, too.
Shit, I don’t know, it never crossed my mind, I repeated, wearing this glazed stupefied expression. I’ve never just satisfied a woman that way.
You mean you don’t want to satisfy a woman when you’re not being satisfied. When there’s nothing in it for you, then there’s simply nothing in it for anyone, is that it?
“Where to, folks?” I’d picked up a fare outside a famous lounge, Butterfield 8, the name of the bungalow that Howard Hughes had stayed in at The Beverly Hills Hotel decades ago, and the name of the movie with Elizabeth Taylor playing a prostitute. The three in my cab reminded me of neither. They were young, still smelling of piss. They also reeked from the vodka they’d consumed. It filled the cab with a sweet, sickly smell; it made me slightly nauseous.
“Can we smoke?” a chick in the back asked. A razor thin girl with bad skin.
“Sorry,” I said, “if I get caught, it costs me a days’ pay.”
“Don’t worry,” the kid said, “I’ll pay whatever it costs.”
“Hey, that’s cool,” I responded, “give me a hundred and ten up front and smoke to your heart’s content. In fact, if you do that, I might smoke one, too.”
He kept his hands out of his pockets and just gave me three different destinations for my passengers, but the hour was early, the traffic light. The fare came to twelve dollars and change. He gave me fifteen and departed. “Thanks,” I said. If he heard that, which I doubted, he didn’t acknowledge it. Most fares I’d picked up didn’t acknowledge much of anything, or make anything that could pass for conversation, unlike the first time I drove when people weren’t as isolated or removed from their immediate reality by cell phones, Walkmen, and iPods...
I shot back downtown to where the only action was at this time of day. You could line up at one of the major hotels and try to get a fare to the airport, if you were willing to wait on a taxi line. Waiting was never one of my strong suits. And, as far as waiting at an airport for a return fair: forget about that. That was torture. You’d wait up to two, three hours and then maybe, maybe, you’d get a fare back into Manhattan, rather than a “shortie” into Queens or Brooklyn. No thanks. Not for me.
The Meat Market. For years, besides being the distribution center for all the meat that gets into the restaurants, supermarkets, and specialty stores of Manhattan, it was the stomping grounds of transvestite and transsexual hookers who provided the quick back seat blowjob for the cabbie, truck driver, and the upper to middle class Joe on their ways home to their lock jawed wives in New Jersey. This neighborhood had become too trendy for the girls to freely market their trade as they had done in years past. Clubs, boutiques, restaurants, galleries, and a hotel with no name, had sprouted on the streets, and provided eyes that disapproved of the independent, but sordid business, of the girls. There were unarticulated parameters for “the hip” to step through the velvet rope. Only on the weekends during the summer, when the cognoscenti were safely sequestered in The Hamptons were the bridge and tunnel crowd welcomed.
Most of the streets were cobblestone and slick with the embedded smell of blood, of decades of livestock, hooked and spun into the fluorescent glow of the butcher’s cleaver. Wait long enough in New York City and it will all come to where you are, whether you want it to or not.
Second Avenue was empty. I sped downtown. In a few minutes time I stood before Lotus, a club known for its meat market “hipness,” and watched as a group of “new swells” hung out, near the curb. Puffing on cigarettes, puking, gazing into the neon ether of street lamps, they tried to decide where to go: home, to another party, destination, open stool, promise or hope? Just give me a fare, I thought. A fucking fare. Hopefully uptown. Ten to twenty bucks. Fuck the tip. Who cared? Each buck earned was mine, tip or not.
The manager--you could tell because he was dressed in “better black”--began to pull the steel shutters down. Before he was finished a kid came out lugging his DJ equipment and motioned for me to open my trunk. I pushed the button near my armrest and the trunk sprung up. I knew he didn’t need any help and I didn’t offer any. The benefits of age. I learned it didn’t mean a damn thing if I helped this kid or not. I hoped the fare would be to Brooklyn, the Bronx, shit, maybe Staten Island.
“I’m going to Baxter, off Broadway,” he said.
“Sure,” I replied. Maybe six bucks. Maybe. The traffic was still light and we got there in a few minutes. “What’s here?” I asked.
“After hours, man. Chinese chicks. Hot, man.”
“Five seventy,” I said.
“Here’s ten, keep it.”
“Thanks.”
He got out and I popped the trunk. After I was sure he got all the equipment he stored and the trunk was slammed, I put her in gear and cruised uptown. I’d known I’d picked up just about the last fare from the known lounges and decided on going to a gay club on 20th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. If nothing else, there’d be some cabbies, some of whom I knew, hanging around, and a porter who sometimes touted me onto some business.
There was one cab in front of me as I pulled up to the curb in back of him. I left the motor running, got out and lit a cigarette. I walked to where the first cab stood, wanting to find out if there was enough action upstairs to warrant me staying.
“How’s it going, brother?” I asked him.
“You got a smoke?”
I shook one out of my pack and gave him one. Cigarettes now were seven to eight dollars a pack, thanks to Bloomberg. Let the poor and addicted pay for the richly addicted. “I just got here, man. Where else you gonna go? The streets dead now.”
Hector had been driving for twenty-five years and was fried to a crisp. I looked up at the coming dawn. A soft wattage was breaking, which allowed you to see the geometric innocence.
I looked at Hector who looked at the burning cigarette between his index and middle fingers. The faces of all those who I knew and saw since I started my shift, came into focus. I tried to figure out why and couldn’t. Perhaps, I said to myself, because all of us essentially wanted the same things, even that mick prick, Calloway: get through the day, have a meal, a drink, and maybe get close to a woman’s haunches; we all just wanted a way to make it. Nobody, of course, was guaranteed any or all of that. Why some men suckled huge, giving, breasts night after night and others were locked-up like pet rodents was another mystery.
I had one eye on the strip club across the street. Maybe I’d get a fair to Queens. When money becomes as important, if not more important, than pussy, you know you’ve turned a corner in your life. A Mercedes was idling at the curb. I turned to Hector. “What time did you start?”
“I told you already, man.”
“Yeah, right, right.” I had nothing else to say to him. I never did. If he took the lead, I heard him out. Otherwise, we usually smoked in silence. I walked over to the door of the gay club. The porter was inside using Windex on the mirrors, the doors would be next. He smiled when he saw me. A diminutive man with skin the color of dark coffee, he wore a short sleeved white shirt and khakis; both garments had seen better days. I offered him a cigarette. He smiled, took it, and tucked it away in his breast pocket.
“Busy upstairs?”
“Yeah, busy, busy. Least twenty or more people. A few I know go to Queens and one goes to Long Island. You wait.”
“Thanks.” I turned around and went out the door. It’s amazing, sometimes, what the least amount of kindness could buy, I thought. It ain’t “kindness,” it’s “barter,” that’s what it really is. How old do I have to be to get it straight? I laughed to myself and went back to my cab, which was now coughing up a storm.
“Better shut that fucking thing off, man,” Hector said, “if you want to see the end of the fucking day.”
I reached inside and turned the ignition key. The engine died and the car wheezed and choked before releasing it’s grip on life.
The end of the day. I’d get home fractured from the grind. And then what? For the briefest of seconds you’re happy handing over the keys and trip sheet, walk outside the decrepit office, light a cigarette and inhale, savoring the smoke that reached your lungs unencumbered by your next fare, your eyes readjusted to just seeing things and not constantly searching out people who either are, or might be, looking for a cab. Take a bus to your pad, climb the flights, open your door, and walk into...emptiness.
Not quite emptiness; if it were only emptiness it wouldn’t be so bad. It was over forty years of books, music, loves, half baked ideas, still born novels, rubberbanded rejections, a few successes framed, reams of poetry, pictures, papers, tumbling weeds, furniture that dated back to my childhood, pens, and more pens, a phone that hardly rang, (though sometimes I looked over at it as if it were about to), and her. She was all over the pad. In my towels, sheets, underwear, socks, sweaters, shirts, in the stones on my window sill and the ones in my stomach, cards in and out of my desk, the air. At times I felt I couldn’t turn my head, let alone turn around, without getting cut.
“Hey, Charlie, wake the fuck up, man, you got a fare,” Hector shouted as he eased his way into the street with one of his own. I looked over at him and saw him grinning from ear to ear. At first I felt a little confused coming out of the daze I was in, then I saw my fare. He stood at least 6’6”, weighed well over 250, white, black hair curled on his bare chest which was crossed with two, thick, black leather belts that tied themselves onto another belt, but thicker, and studded with silver studs, around his stomach. Under that he wore nothing, nothing except a black leather jock strap. Hmm, this should be fun, I said to myself, as he slid into the back seat.
“Where to?” I deadpanned.
“Thirty-fourth and Eighth Avenue,” he said in a voice that was much softer and modulated than I would have expected. “Do you know the hotel on that corner?”
“Know it, I do.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I took off through the darkness and went down Eighth to his hotel. He paid the fare, gave me a decent enough tip and got out. He entered the revolving doors, passed a uniformed employee and a person who manned the desk. Neither turned a head. I watched as he went to the elevators, punched the button and stood there, waiting, without the least trace of self-consciousness. I eased back into traffic. At one time that hotel belonged to a self-appointed Dr. No; a guru/minister of some kind of Asian faith. He had disciples that numbered in the thousands who stayed there. I wondered if my last fare would have been allowed to convert, given his appearance. I felt sure he’d be welcomed, if he had some dough.

Sure enough, not long after one, the afternoon sun blazing, humidity hanging off my rear view mirror, and the sweat clinging to my arms and back, “ol’ number thirteen” began to lurch and stall; the temperature gauge inched further upward, still within reason, but I knew, not for much longer. C’mon baby, I coaxed, a few more hours, just a few, baby, then I’ll take you home, get you some water. Try to relax, baby. Every time I tried to get downtown to Battery Park City and give her and myself a reprieve I was hailed somewhere in midtown. The passenger usually asked me to take him or her cross town, into the thickest, most fucked up, traffic. It seemed every main thoroughfare and side street had some kind of construction going on. You just stood, idling in exhaust fumes, going nowhere. The passengers these days usually were on a cell phone speaking to either their next appointment, broker, lover or, for all I knew, a suicide prevention worker. It seemed that if they weren’t speaking to someone it somehow would have diminished them in my eyes, but more probably their own.
A cabbie makes no money standing still, contrary to popular belief. If one was to just keep the meter running for a twelve hour shift it would amount to the cost of the cab for the day. You made money two ways: movement and turnover, plus tips. Going from the west side on 52nd Street let’s say, to 52nd and Second, the tab might be three sixty or so. If your fare gave you four bucks, (which was usually the case), you were royally screwed. That’s why a day driver usually averaged between eighty and a hundred a day, after expenses. There’s always a balance to whatever you do, especially for those on the margins.
After dropping off a fair near Gracie Mansion, I put my Off Duty light on and went down a dead end street and shut off the cab. She heaved and sighed and came to a rest. I took a pull from a huge bottle of mineral water I carried. I opened the hood and peeled myself out like a crippled tinker toy, and lit a smoke. The sun tattooed itself on my forehead. Even my polarized sunglasses struggled against the light. It felt good to stand. I began stretching my six foot plus frame as far as my ligaments and tendons would let me, which wasn’t much.
Some of those who came out of the building where I was double parked looked me over for a second. First they registered some apprehension and then saw my cab and felt better. Some nodded to me, asking if I’d take a fare. I nodded them away. I might be in the shit house, but it was my shit house. Besides, my pad, was rent controlled. Fuckem. I could be a sport for three twenty-seven fifty a month. Hell, it cost me over forty years of my life. They shouldn’t even charge me that. The bastards. Every time my landlord saw me, which wasn’t often, he’d asked if I’d contracted any form of fatal disease. He kept offering me money to leave. I’d always asked if I could move in with him, fuck his wife, or daughter and sit down to a meal. It didn’t sit well with him, but not very much did. It was a good thing I knew a thing or two about fixing crappers or else I’d have to find the nearest gas station in the middle of the night. Not fun in the neighborhood I lived in. At least that was the story until Julio moved in. Julio’s reputation preceded him. We began to run into each other in the halls, outside the building, in the corner bar, and became as friendly as we once were. When the landlord discovered that, all of his bullshit stopped. It stopped dead. In fact, he now went out of his way to be nice to me. I never asked what invoked such changes, but I didn’t have to.
This neighborhood had nice crappers, even in the park. The grass, brown and lifeless all over town, was green here, and moist. You could lie down in such grass. Daydream. The air was cleaner. It smelled salty from the river. I wondered if some of the expenses for the condos and co-ops was the price of air. It certainly seemed they chipped in and paid for it.
I flipped the cigarette toward the curb and got back into the cab. When the ignition caught, the temperature needle climbed further upward. Obviously, the rest helped neither of us. I shut off the engine and walked over to a phone booth on the corner.
“Service,” the voice on the other end said.
“This is Fortune. My cab is about to explode.”
“Uh, explode?”
“Yeah, fuckin explode. Whatdayawantmetodo?”
“How hot?”
“How hot? Hot enough to fry your mother’s ovaries into dust.”
“You don’t have to be funny.”
“Who’s bein funny? Whatdayawant...”
“Bring her in. Where are you?”
I told him and he advised me to drive slowly to Fifth Avenue, the Avenue of least resistance this time of day, go down it “carefully,” and bring her to the service department.
“You’ll give me credit for some time lost?”
“We’ll see once we check her out.”
“Fuck it, I’ll drive and let her burn.”
“No, no, come in, you got three hours.”
“See ya later.”
Windows opened and with my Off Duty light still on, I made it back to the shop. The garage entrance was so narrow it seemed they never wanted to have a cab brought up there to be serviced. I didn’t care how many tries I had to make. I tooled the sonofabitch up the stiff ramp.
“What is it this time?” Rufus asked.
“Gonna blow, brother, any second. Better get your gloves on, flak jacket, goggles.”
I dragged my ass down the ramp and into the office. The air conditioner dripped with the regularity of a patient on diuretics. I handed the trip sheet to Tommy, a decent enough fellow.
“You owe me for three. I’ll deduct it from next week’s rent.”
“Sure. Take it easy.”
When I walked out into this wet horse blanket of a city, I had the stupid sensation of being free.

© 2015 Norman Savage

Part of my novel: THE TROUBLE WITH DREAMS--2007

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015