Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab

by Dmitry Samarov

  Off the expressway and south on Austin Boulevard, past Roosevelt, we turn onto a side street lined with bungalows. She points out the one to stop at, then hands $25 through the open partition. She thanks me and puts out her hand, zeroing in with her cold dark eyes and telling me her name. Is she trying to line up another date? No way of knowing, but this must be how it’s done. I wish her a good night, and she walks up the gangway between two nearly identical little brick houses and out of sight as I pull away, uncertain what’s on tap.

  Gandalf

  I’ve been off a few weeks. Coming back to the garage to get a cab late on a Sunday night is no cause for celebration, but there was no way of knowing what hell was in store. Judging by the cashier’s face, it’s clear that it doesn’t look good.

  Normally putting your name on the waiting list before midnight on a Sunday or Monday will give you a fair chance of getting out of there a few hours later with some sort of vehicle. The list is capped at ten, so if you’re eleventh, you come back and try again the next day. That night there were seventy names in line. Another cab company had gotten into some kind of trouble with the city, and a bunch of their cabs were pulled off the street. This forced their drivers to seek cars elsewhere, bringing us to the present situation. The sympathetic cashier takes down my chauffeur’s license and cell phone number, suggesting I come back the next afternoon but not leaving much cause for optimism.

  I come back the following day and the night after that to no avail. By Wednesday or Thursday on a typical week (much less a disaster of one than this week), there’s not much chance of landing anything, so figuring to try again Sunday, I write the week off. The plan is to go in around midnight and sit there until something turns up. In preparation for this, I’m at my favorite bar drinking bourbon early Saturday evening when my phone rings. They have a cab for me, but I have to pick it up in the next hour or it will go to the next guy in the queue. Leaving my friends with the promise of a quick return, I hightail it to the garage.

  It’s a real beater—five years old, 323,000 miles, with every attendant wheeze, squeak, and groan. The driver’s side door locks on its own when not held open, the meter is missing buttons—I’d need to jab at a taped-over cavity to start the thing—but this and myriad other defects have to be ignored as the prospect of more days off would begin to seriously make keeping a roof overhead a dicey proposition. I speed back to the bar to toast my good fortune.

  The next day, attempting to log in to the computerized taxi dispatch system, another problem with my chariot rears its head. The whole setup is called a Gandalf. It replaced the two-way radio of old with the grizzled dispatcher squawking day and night, causing every shift to be accompanied by a low-grade migraine. The little screen displays the available fares with little backtalk and few recriminations. For the seven years that I’ve used it, the procedure has been the same—sign in with your company code, and you’re good to go, happy hunting. Well, this Sunday morning it doesn’t work. Putting in the code repeatedly yields a message to “SWIPE THE CARD.” The meter is locked and useless without being logged into the system, so there’s no use in driving at this point. Having never seen this before and not knowing what else to do, I go back to the garage to have it looked at.

  On Sundays at the cab barn only a skeleton crew shows up. It’s a 24-hours-a-day/7-days-a-week industry, but you wouldn’t know it by the hours that the mechanics and management keep. Telling the shop guy my problem, he tells me there’s no one to look into it just now. I have to drop the cab and go back home and wait for them to call whenever it’s repaired or another vehicle becomes available. Standing in line to hand over the meter to the cashier, another driver asks if he can take the roll of meter paper out of mine as he’d run out. Not thinking anything of it, I hand it over.

  By 8 p.m., figuring there’d be nothing happening this night, I settle in for the evening with a movie and a heated-up can of soup. The phone rings: it’s the night manager saying my cab is fixed. Telling him that I wasn’t able to log into the system came as a surprise. “That what was wrong? Well, it’ll be fixed by the time you get here,” he promises. Makes me wonder what it was they had “fixed” in the intervening eight hours. The old-timer who drives me over listens to my story and informs me that the procedure has changed—we now have to swipe our Yellow Cab Company ID cards in lieu of punching in the code for access. This means that there’s nothing wrong with my jalopy’s Gandalf, and I get to feel like an idiot to boot.

  The nearly toothless night manager greets me by more or less accusing me of tampering with the meter. “Ain’t nothing wrong with it. Won’t work with the buttons missing and no paper in it,” he crows. It takes all the reserves of self-control I can summon not to smack the old fool in the face. The policy is to compensate the time lost with a shop credit. This hardly makes up for a day of fares as the formula is just to divide up the cost of the lease—it works out to $3 and change per hour; my eight hours is good for about $25. Now that it is determined that there is nothing wrong, I won’t even get that. I’m pretty steamed by the time it’s my turn at the cashier’s window. Treating the poor guy on the other side of the glass with a barrage of curses aimed at the night manager, I sign my lease and am about to hand over the full payment when he stops me short. “No, look, he gave you six hours credit,” he says, beaming. For once incompetence and inconsistency work out in my favor.

  Instead of having another go at the dentally challenged creep, I tear out of there, content to steer the creaky old Crown Vic through the streets the best I can. The lost day could have easily been avoided with some simple explanation, but that would have made common sense and that is just not how we do it in the cab industry.

  HOLIDAY

  Working holidays in the cab is a special kind of lonesome. Not much will make you feel more left out than when the whole world is celebrating while you work. The dining options also leave a lot to be desired. On the other hand, there are few better occasions to watch people as they attempt to enjoy themselves. That’s what we’re supposed to do on the holidays.

  Stanley Cup

  The afternoon before the Chicago Blackhawks won the 2010 Stanley Cup started as most any Wednesday would. Around 3 p.m. the early birds of the office flock tiptoe toward the streets and homeward, occasionally catching a cab to hasten their flight. The avenues begin to thicken and clog with the start of the evening exodus. A blonde in her twenties asks to go to one of the taverns on Madison a few blocks east of the United Center. “It’s not even 4 p.m., so it shouldn’t be too bad at West End, right?” she asks. We can see the line of jersey-clad fans circling the building from two blocks away. “Oh no . . . just drop me here, I guess, don’t know where to go now.”

  Bars in every neighborhood fill their sidewalk seats to overflowing with red-white-and-black-attired revelers. Most eyes are glued to the flat screens broadcasting the big game; other people are swept along in the overall enthusiasm of the crowd. Driving past with no horse in the race, nothing riding on the outcome, I’m free to take it all in at face value. The yelps and whoops escaping from so many windows foreshadow the roars to come hours later. So many different-shaped bodies in uniform puts one in mind of a poorly trained militia with leaderless splinter cells roaming the side streets on mystery missions. Working on this night, as with so many other festive nights, sets one necessarily apart from the masses. Climbing onto the bandwagon at this point would’ve been ludicrous in any case. Hockey just doesn’t do a thing for me.

  When the Blackhawks finally win it sometime after 10 p.m., the volume of the night goes up to eleven and stays there for hours. From horns blaring to caterwauling celebrators to improvised explosives, my low-grade headache graduates to full-blown migraine in minutes. On Ontario east of Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s Finest would have made Old Man Daley beam the way they’re preserving the disorder. With cruisers parked perpendicular to create more of a bottleneck than the surging masses manage on their own, the men in blue stick out their chests and peer thi
s way and that. Clearing their gauntlet somehow, I turn south onto Michigan and pick up a pretty girl in a green summer dress. “How about those Hawks!” is what I think she says, though the ringing in my ears makes most speech the barest whisper.

  Two women run into the middle of Randolph in the West Loop and ask to be taken north. “We were at Market and they wouldn’t even let us turn the TVs up! Can you believe that shit? . . . That place is full of douche-bags anyways. Most of them didn’t even turn their heads to watch. Take us someplace where we can do it up right!” The farther north we go on Halsted, the thicker the crowds became, many reaching in to slap hands and holler at every passing vehicle.

  The car horns continue to blare, punctuated occasionally by more piercing reports from distant quarters. Coming up to Fullerton and Western, a plume of smoke rises and spreads over the entire intersection as Streets and San men shovel sand to douse a trash bin set ablaze. Many overcome costumed zealots have to be dodged with deft maneuvers as they seem no longer to accept the sidewalks as their natural habitat. The migraine mutates and throbs in heretofore unknown sectors of my cranium. The GO, HAWKS! screams go on and on, despite the fact that they’ve gone as far as there is to go.

  Near 2 a.m. it’s time to call it a night, but not before picking up a couple who say they’d be paying by debit card before ducking out of sight and proceeding to have at each other in the most desperate way. With the ride being barely a mile in duration, their amazing ardor could only get them so far; fixing their clothes back into place as best they can, they stumble out to continue marking the home team’s big night behind closed doors.

  Fourth of July

  It is the local custom to mark our nation’s birth by staking out spots by the waterfront. People fight for the best places, the parking lots along the beach full-up by midmorning. Waves of half-dressed patriots rush eastward to roast in the July sun, to be closer to the nighttime fireworks display marking the Fourth. Much of the afternoon is taken up with trips to the North, Belmont, Montrose, Foster, and other beaches. Or as close to them as the police blockades would allow, as the crowds swelled with each passing hour; families would jump out and unload folding chairs, grills, charcoal, and umbrellas from the taxi’s trunk in the middle of Lake Shore Drive on-ramps and hurdle over and around barriers toward the lake. There’s something primal about these throngs drawing toward water as so many, at one time or another, long to be back near the sea.

  At the corner of McClurg and Ontario, a barefoot man, furiously sucking on a cigarette, flags me down. “Take me to Schaumburg?” he asks in a short way.

  “Sure,” I answer—who’d turn down an $85 fare? We make our way west to the Kennedy without any chatter except for the permission given to keep smoking. Then he gets on his cell. “What do you mean, where am I? I’m in a cab going to Schaumburg . . . YOU told me to get out of the car! YOU did your fake act being a tough guy, what did you expect me to do? I’m taking a fuckin’ $150 cab ride because of you!?!” He hangs up and lights another. Some ten miles and several calls later, he asks to be taken to Navy Pier instead.

  The crush of buses, taxis, trolleys, and all other manner of conveyance as we near is close to impenetrable, but all the while he’s describing what he sees out the window, triangulating his friends’ exact location. “I’m directly across from, like, a gigantic hot air balloon. Where are you?” They’re going to pay his $40-and-climbing cab fare as some sort of peace offering. Idling in front of the Pier’s main entrance for some ten minutes, enduring dirty looks from the traffic aides and rent-a-cops recruited to assist on the holiday, a girl finally comes up and hands her MasterCard through the passenger’s side window. “Where the hell did you go?” she asks, signing the slip, though it’s unclear whether her question is directed at him or at me.

  The explosions increase as night begins to fall. Dogs lose bladder control and hide under beds this time of year, and some of us who walk upright don’t feel much better. The tumult and flashing lights do nothing for my equilibrium, and a few hours into it, a corkscrew begins to work at two or three strategic points inside my skull, affecting my mood adversely. Somewhere on Sheridan Road, an old man gets the full brunt for his inability to keep that boat of a Lincoln in his own lane—when I suggest that he’d be better served taking a trolley or a golf cart, his grown son in the passenger’s seat takes exception and suggests that I relax and mind my own business. One thing for sure: I wouldn’t be caught dead out here if there wasn’t money at stake. The fact that the masses submit to it of their own volition makes me question my membership in the species.

  Stuck behind a booze bus on Clark Street, a guy with slicked-back hair hangs out of the back window trying to get my fare’s attention. He jabs a little flag in her direction and roars, “LADY, AMERICA!!! YEAH!?!” and slams his beer.

  At 9:30 p.m., with the lakefront display seemingly over, an exodus of sunburned bodies trudges west. Three luck out and get to the taxi on Fullerton, and we get on Lake Shore northbound. Halfway to the Belmont exit, traffic comes to a standstill in the center and right lanes. Thinking the ramp’s backed up, I veer into the left lane only to see the sky ignited once more with multicolored flares and notice that all those vehicles have their hazards on as their occupants are mesmerized by the light show over the harbor. I drive on as my passengers ooh and aah out the window, happy for the encore performance. An hour or two more of hauling the lakefront revelers saps the last of my strength.

  A rye on the rocks at a friend’s quiet bar serves to put the day’s cacophony to rest before hanging it up for the night. What blowing shit up has to do with our independence must be left to more nimble minds, though parking the cab at 2 a.m., the sparklers seen going full bore down the street prove that my neighbors’ ardor for America shows no sign of abating.

  Halloween

  The kiddie candy-gathering aspect of Halloween is eclipsed by the nocturnal masked bacchanal more with each passing year. The packs of chaperoned, orderly children hauling pumpkin-hued plastic bags of sweets disappear with the setting sun, to be replaced by more or less creatively disguised hordes.

  This year, to add to the high jinks, daylight saving time ends on the same night, adding an extra hour of imbibing to the delight of the reveling masses as the clock falls back, making 2 a.m. 1 a.m. again. No chauffeur of any standing would pass on it. Nevertheless, after a time, the marauding crowds spilling from all directions make for a chaotic and exhausting work environment; we truly earn it on these nights.

  There is no shortage of funny getups—Forrest Gump giving me chocolates and debating the dubious merits of the film that spawned him; two pretty girls dressed as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum; half a dozen mostly mediocre Fred Flintstones; a guy in a very professionally constructed Whoopee Cushion costume.

  The girl I pick up on a radio call at around the second 2 a.m. (the one that was really 3 a.m.) doesn’t stand out for what she wears but more for what she says. She’s in a short black dress, fishnets, with very red lipstick and nails. Plopping in the backseat, she immediately asks whether it’s OK to smoke, then if she can sit up front. This is normally a big no-no—unless there’s no room in the back, no one sits in the passenger seat. Besides the possible safety concerns, it implies a familiarity that few drivers would welcome when confronted with the average passenger. These are not our friends, we aren’t giving them a lift, and no matter how casually we’re often addressed, this is still a business transaction. For whatever reason, I let that all go.

  “Thank you for taking me home.” She smiles, a bit bleary-eyed. “So I invited him to a slumber party, and he turned me down. I said, ‘Wanna come over for a sleepover, just you and me?’ and he said no . . . What’s up with that?” In response to the less-than-comforting clichés I offer, she isn’t impressed. “You don’t know me; I’m not that kind of girl. This is the one for me. He’s only thirty and a partner in a law firm. He’s everything I ever wanted. I’m straight-up small-town. I just wanna be taken care of, you know? He opens
doors for me—it makes all the difference.”

  She’d been at a girlfriend’s party texting her dream guy, making arrangements, and when it didn’t turn out as she’d hoped, she was in no mood to celebrate any longer. “Anyways, she’s moving to Mexico ON MY BIRTHDAY! So fuck her . . . So, what about you?” She refuses to believe that her driver has no personal life, but unable to glean any details, she lets it go to blow clouds of smoke out the window.

  “I can tell you’re a decent guy or I wouldn’t have sat up front,” she says as we slow at her doorstep. “Will you give me a hug?”

  I do.

  November 4, 2008

  Eastbound on Roosevelt around 8:30 p.m., approaching the southwest corner of Grant Park, swarms collect slowly drifting north; the left onto Michigan Avenue takes three green lights. The crowd swells, threatening the path of cars and buses, oblivious, otherwise occupied. Tchotchkes are hawked at every opportunity, from the Dollar Store to haute couture in service to the cause.

  My passengers hop out at the far end of the park, and I head away from the throngs, back to the neighborhoods, with the idea of shepherding more pilgrims to the altar. At Damen and Division, a white ’75 Caprice guns a left, causing the bumper of my cab to make close acquaintance with its right rear quarter panel, effectively ending my night. He attempts to slip away but is thwarted a mere half block down by a police cruiser.

  At the garage, photos of the damage are taken, then the wait begins. The TV in the waiting room blares out the election results; the trickle of drivers react ecstatically, bursting with a nearly familial pride; many believing their shared African heritage with the president-elect entitle them to some small share of the victory. As the hours drag on, having seen the speeches, analysis, maps, charts, and interviews dozens of times, one impression lingers: This one really was different. Contrary to the fanatic zeal and adoration of his acolytes, Obama seems as close to a real person as we’ve seen in the last twenty years of presidential hopefuls. It would be good not to feel ashamed or disgusted to be a citizen of this country; if nothing else, it’ll be refreshing to have a leader who can form a complete sentence.