Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab

by Dmitry Samarov

  Demons

  I’m stopped at a red at Chicago and State just past the YMCA on a blustery evening when a guy bolts across the street and gets in through the left rear door of the cab without any warning.

  “Take me to 79th and Halsted . . . No, better take me to the 35th Street Po-lice Station, my sister’s there.”

  We head southbound on Lake Shore Drive, and he asks, “What is this? Lake Shore? . . . Oh, OK . . .” Just then a hulking SUV’s headlights overtake us, and he jerks his head around, then ducks out of view as if under the hail of enemy fire.

  “Who’s that? Don’t know why they’re tryin’ ta kill me. Somethin’ that happened to one of the other guys at the place I was stayin’, now they’re after me . . . Have ya heard about it?”

  A few moments of silence is broken by his sudden suspicion that we’ve passed our exit, a tone that implies complicity in the conspiracy against him; after I reassure him by pointing out roadside landmarks to verify our course, he apologizes but remains vigilant.

  We pull up, and he hands over a money clip as collateral. “Gotta go inside to get the rest,” he explains, and runs into the overlit lobby of the police station. An inventory of the clip yields four singles, a Link Card (electronic food stamps), a library card, and a state ID all miraculously under the same name with a picture that even bears some resemblance to my passenger.

  He returns with a uniformed woman—couldn’t say if she was a cop or a security guard—who leans through the window and asks how much he owes. “Ain’t got that much, gotta go back upstairs for my wallet, all right?” she says, then asks him where he’s spending the night, and when he tells her, she hollers, “Stanley, ain’t got no damn cell to put ya in!” Nevertheless, he gathers his things from the backseat and slinks toward the glass doors . . .

  Ten minutes later she’s back, and upon hearing about the forces fomenting the man’s demise can only shake her head wearily; the demons are no stranger to her. She overtips and tells me to be safe, then shivers and pulls her coat close against the windswept night.

  Gangway

  Late one night, the dispatcher directs me to an address off Fullerton near Logan Square. I pull up and a woman with ratty bleached-blond hair and a tie-dyed shirt comes out carrying a bunch of plastic bags. Placing the load in the backseat, she gives an Oh well kind of look and shrugs before shivering against the chill and retreating back toward the house. A heavily made-up Latina is next out. She seems more intent on her phone conversation than actually making it from the doorway to the cab, but gradually that gap narrows, then closes.

  “Forty-third and Western, you can take the highway,” she directs before lapsing into silence. Her curly hair shines slick with oily product, her lipstick applied and reapplied generously to form a sort of patina, enough mascara to cause a raccoon envy, and various other tinctures to alter or hide the true nature of her visage. She has those long acrylic nails, the ones encrusted with fake diamonds. The parts that are unadorned are a Day-Glo teal.

  As we speed past downtown, she quietly intones into her cell, “C’mon, baby, I know you can do it. I believe in you, you make me so proud . . . You the MAN, don’t be a negative, baby . . . just the way we talked about, I love you sooo much.”

  We get off the Stevenson, and she directs me up Archer toward Western. McKinley Park is dead-still at this hour. As with most neighborhoods in the city, 1 a.m. on a Monday is a time to quietly gird for the coming workweek. We speed down the avenues, unchecked by other vehicles, hardly slowed by traffic lights, before coming to rest on a narrow one-way street in front of a neatly appointed single-family abode. She hurriedly rechecks her makeup in the mirror. “. . . so tired,” she murmurs under her breath while counting out the price of the fare.

  “Do I look OK?” she asks, making eye contact for the first time, revealing the faint, mostly healed bruise on her left cheek. She gathers up her belongings and drags them to the black metal gangway gate on the side of the house. She asks me to stay until she’s made it inside, so I sit there watching her fumble with the lock. The motion detector lights and darkens the porch every other minute. Giving up, she comes back to the cab. “My key won’t work, I need to call my fiancé to come out and unlock it. Don’t leave, please.” She argues her case into the cell for what seems like eons before a guy in a hoodie and shorts appears and grudgingly unlocks the gate. They disappear between the two houses without looking back.

  Vampire Hours

  Hauling up and down empty avenues on winter weeknights can be its own kind of purgatory. But at those instances when one feels like the last being drawing breath, the others make their presence felt. The truly dedicated drinkers, the lonely lunatics for whom time of day or place don’t matter, the speed-addled tow truckers, the cops looking for an excuse, and the other cabbies fool enough to be out fighting over the few sorry scraps left to be had.

  The winter snow-route parking ban brings schools of haulers out onto the quiet thoroughfares to conduct their insane death races. Tow trucks turn feral at night, treating moving vehicles like stationary obstacles, paying only cursory attention to traffic signals, ignoring lane configurations altogether. To have one of these panting, hungry beasts riding your ass will wake you from the deepest reverie. Dragging carcasses back to the yard doesn’t slow their pace any; some leave a trail of sparks off some poor SUV’s bumper in their wake, no time for niceties in their feeding frenzy. Like taxis, each is adorned with its own war paint or coat of arms, and each seems dimly aware of the competition without allowing for any more than tense tolerance. They’re lone wolves by nature, out to get their prey, to stash it, then come back for more.

  The cops sit in their cruisers, driver’s side to driver’s side, talking about whatever it is that cops talk about. The blue swirling lights, visible for miles, cause the rest of us to approach with trepidation, then veer slowly into oncoming lanes to avoid them, cursing under our breath about tax dollars, double standards, and all those other things we can’t or won’t ever change. Other cops fly by, sirens blaring, en route to back up their brethren, five or six of them surrounding some souped-up Toyota with after-market rims, spinners, maybe some neon. Several usually guard the perimeter, making sure their rites aren’t scrutinized too closely by the laity. Best to keep one’s head down and glide by meekly, away from any chance to rouse their suspicions.

  The odd types who’ll venture out on these nights when they should really stay in just don’t know any better. The ones who aren’t on urgent missions to or from their local tavern want things that never quite add up. The cheerful, ragged girl from Ukrainian Village is one. She wants to go to the West Side. Then she asks to stop at Village Pizza on Chicago and Western for a slice, when we’d already passed it. Next, she insists on going by the place with the bullet-proof glass for her smokes. Then the CITGO station after that, where she runs in with her cigarette still half-lit, spending a good five minutes inside as the meter ticks away and emerging with a fistful of lottery tickets and a box of Boo Berry cereal.

  “Never see this shit anymore, couldn’t help gettin’ it. These motherfuckers out here don’t realize I got a taxi waiting. They take they sweet-ass time . . .” She has me drop her at an all-night sub and gyro joint, her shopping spree apparently not quite done.

  Working nights early in the week is mostly thankless drudgery—watching the needle on the fuel gauge creeping southward while counting and recounting the stack of singles that just won’t multiply. There’s always, mercifully, the one pickup that you decide is the last of the night. Mine’s waving in front of a corner bar across the street. I hang a U-turn just as she crosses over to my side of the street. Completing the circle, she jumps in, shivering from the whipping wind. “Do you usually work these hours, are you a night owl?” she asks.

  “Yup, vampire hours,” I answer. Getting a laugh out of a pretty girl from this tired line makes the preceding hours almost worth it.

  TUESDAY

  The fish begin to bite a bit more on a Tue
sday. There are still gaps between fares, but with a little inclement weather and some luck, a cabbie can walk away at the end of the shift with a few bucks in his pocket.

  Banter

  After the snow stops, the melting and graying begins. A woman stands on the curb, in the narrow break between two drifts, separated from the cab door by a dark moat of slush and grime. “Thirteen hundred North Astor at the corner of Gertuh, or Gothee,” she says after finally braving that chasm, re-soaking her black boots, as evidenced by the jagged line of salt residue spanning heel to toe. That she felt the need to pronounce Goethe in both the German and the Chicago way is an instant conversation starter. She’s a teacher at Roberto Clemente (pronounced Clementee, not Clementay), so correct pronunciation is a point of pride.

  “No one knows where I live if I don’t say it both ways.” Neither of us is a native, so naturally the odd local ways of pronouncing Paulina and Devon (Paul-eye-nuh and Duh-von) are discussed, among others. Then to cap it off, there’s an agreeable evisceration of Boston, Massachusetts, a town upon which the heaping of scorn is a time-honored tradition in my taxi. Most who have had the misfortune of living there feel the same and earn points by commiserating. This is one of those rare conversations that break the barrier between driver and passenger. Nothing earth-shaking or portending of anything further, just banter to be savored for its own simple qualities.

  “Thank you for rescuing me from that ridiculous street, just couldn’t deal with those puddles anymore.” She smiles and heads into her high-rise, the path mercifully free and clear.

  The girl is in a hurry to drop off her rent check into the mail slot of the realty office before continuing on elsewhere. “My boyfriend usually takes care of it, but I started getting calls about it and, guess what, he didn’t. Gotta love THAT!” We swap deadbeat roommate stories, the former friends lost over piddling sums, such a common experience that we all store rants on the subject, to be rolled out for occasions such as this one.

  “I have to ask friends of friends to remind them, like, dude, you owe me money!” she says, laughing, then jumps out to meet up with her prince.

  Their address is on Sawyer, yet I sit on Spaulding, the same street number but half a block west. Looking at the two-flat, then at the information on the screen, including “Apt. #2W,” it occurs to me that if there’s only one place on the second floor, it wouldn’t be designated west or east. Hauling ass to the right spot, they’re just coming out as I pull up. We share a laugh over the mistake, apparently it happens all the time. On another day this might lead to tense minutes of silence for the duration of the trip, while today it’s no matter at all.

  None of this is of much consequence aside from the fact that the job so often exposes people in a less than flattering light, and sometimes a bit of small talk can be just what we need. So much of this job is like going on safari or to some far-flung planet, the manners and ways of the inhabitants a hopelessly indecipherable mystery. It’s a relief to talk without worrying about dialect or proper diction, to be understood for a moment, no matter how slight the subject at hand might be.

  Drug Run

  A man calls for a taxi from an all-night diner on Archer. Shaking, sweating, and shifty-eyed, he directs me to the West Side. Over the Eisenhower, north on Pulaski, we slow for him to look over the merchants: guys that hide their faces in hoodies, shout out to passing cars, and signal their crew if there is a bite. “You know what’s going on here, right?” he asks, and I tell him not to say it. He tosses me a twenty as down payment.

  We pull into the parking lot of a fried fish joint, and he rolls down his window and conducts his business.

  Now he’s in a hurry to get out of there and return to that Archer diner. He keeps asking if I’m OK with where we’ve gone; when he pays me about double what’s on the meter, it definitely makes it easier to take. He walks into the over-lit restaurant still sweating buckets, though that’ll pass in minutes, now that he’s scored.

  Supernumerary

  She bounds toward the cab from the Lyric Opera House. A thin middle-aged woman in a white turtleneck, pants, and a Bears cap. “I got the part!

  “This was my fifth try, and I finally got it. I’m going to be onstage in the opera! . . . No, I won’t be singing. Know what a supernumerary is? It’s like an extra. They need them for every production, and it’s an exclusive club; once you’re in, you’re in!” Her eyes glow as she looks out the window, pondering her suddenly bright future.

  “This was one of my life’s goals. To be near the divas when they sing. When I turned fifty, I told myself, ‘I’m going to learn to appreciate opera.’ It took a few years, but I just love it now . . . Can’t help thinking that this is a reward for surviving breast cancer . . . Boy! How am I gonna be able to teach tomorrow? Probably won’t sleep tonight!”

  She teaches computer science at Northwestern, and a pop quiz will have to do for the next day because she won’t be capable of more under the circumstances. She talks of climbing Kilimanjaro, of riding her Harley all over the West, and of how this day ranks right up there with all of them.

  “I’ll have to wear a ring to discourage the men. Not doing it for dating, not ready for that with the cancer and all, you understand? . . . Already see Joe sniffing around, being extra friendly. Got a plain gold band, it’ll do. Can’t blame them for trying. They see a fifty-year-old woman jumping around like that, they think, ‘WOW look at her! She’s like a twenty-year-old!’ ”

  I confess that I have no patience for opera, can never understand why they have to make those awful sounds come out of their throats. She insists that I haven’t given it enough time. “It’s a stylized, artificial art like ballet, and there’s nothing more beautiful when done right.” She’s impressed that a family friend of mine has actually starred at the Lyric, even though I admit to barely making it to intermission when seeing her sing. Nothing I or anyone else might say could dampen my passenger’s joy.

  “Oh, I can’t wait to see what Daryl the doorman will say! When you see the banner for the Lyric’s next season, think of me!” She beams, then turns away toward the glass revolving doors of her high-rise, just off Lake Shore Drive.

  The sun is setting and my goals are more modest than hers. The cabdriver’s role is to play a bit part in others’ lives and be compensated accordingly.

  Fog

  Fog comes in and hides the skyscrapers just as the last of the graying milky daylight fades. Streetlamps light no more than a few feet in any direction before being consumed by the murky cotton wadding that now binds all forms together. Streets driven thousands of times bear no resemblance to their former selves, transformed into stage sets for Gothic tales—or slasher flicks depending on one’s age and taste. The change isn’t entirely unwelcome. After all, it’s not every day that the back of your hand changes into an inscrutable riddle.

  The first passengers to take note of the weather are four Native Americans returning from the North Side to the Marriott on Michigan Avenue. In town from all over the country for that weekend’s Powwow, they speak of life on the Res and ask the usual Chicago tourist questions—no use telling them that the Sears Tower has lost its name since their last visit and that the man who’d designed it had passed away this very day. Instead I tell them how to get to Pizzeria Uno from their hotel and point out where the lake would usually appear out the left windows as we take Lake Shore Drive south. Not only is there no lake, but northbound traffic isn’t much more than disembodied headlights, gone as soon as they appear. My passengers don’t believe that the entrance we stop at leads to their lodgings; it takes some reassuring before they are convinced to disembark. It just isn’t a night for certainty.

  A girl heading to Lakeview questions the route I’m taking, remaining dubious despite a detailed and logical explanation. Being second-guessed doesn’t do much for anyone’s disposition, so a tense silence follows. “Look at all this fog,” she says, voice filled with wonder as she looks out the window to where the lake once was. The bad f
eelings dissipate into awe. The car ahead of us feels with its front wheels for the proper lane, sensing it to either side, as a blind man does with his cane, slowing then speeding, trying in vain to maintain a steady clip. She asks how I like driving in this, and I answer that “like” and “drive” don’t often sit in the same sentence no matter the condition of the road. We part as friends.

  Landmarks leave no trace. Navy Pier is swallowed whole and the less-than-charitable thought that with luck it might not reappear once this pea soup lifts has to be abandoned when the famous Ferris wheel comes into view. No skyline, no grid, only the nearest corners of buildings, with no apparent tops or sides visible in the gaseous drifts; this Tuesday made strange by nature.

  Crack

  Double-parked by the darkened courtyard building in Garfield Park, I key in the Auto Callout code to summon my passenger. A group of young men loiter by the chain-link that surrounds the liquor store next door. They play-punch one another and otherwise horse around to break up the monotony and keep the chill out of their bones. The minutes lurch forward with no sign of my guy, and I put in the code for a “No Show.”

  Before I can pull away, a woman runs out from the farthest doorway and begs me to wait. “He’s comin’; it just take him a while,” she says, then disappears back into the murk. A man in a red-and-white track suit edges into view, moving along the wall of the building, stopping every few feet to gather himself before going on. Cracking the back door, he sucks the air in like a beached carp. He wheezes for me to stay put. “ All right, I need you to take me to the hospital to get a new oxygen tank, then take me back, cool? First though, we got to find this guy, he’s got somethin’ of mine. Just go ahead, I’ll tell you where.”