Well, there was a young man now behind the concessions counter, and he was probably queer, but I paid him no mind. I was riled. Whatsa cunt a wife etc? In the dark this woman had her beaver exposed and with her voice, she’s saying, “Oh, come no, now, now, lick it, lick it, lick it. Mmm, that’s good, hhh, hhh, more, more, more.” Well, that got to me, too, until I couldn’t look no more. Had to hide my eyes. Couldn’t stand to look anymore at all that beaver. All that nastiness to make a dollar. Lickity split . . .
That night I just couldn’t sleep at all. I had so much work to do. The idea that had been growing in my brain for some time now took entire hold of me. I had collected all the material I could find on Palantine’s itinerary from Kennedy Airport to the Plaza Hotel and | about the city. I knew the allocation of secret service personnel from clippings in the Times and was compiling a kind of action or game plan. Words to that effect.
The only solution seemed to lie in true force: that all the kings men could not put Humpty back together for me otherwise. After I memorized Palantine’s route I strapped on the empty holster of the .44 and practiced late into the night at drawing and squeezing off imaginary rounds. I had devised this system of metal gliders along my inner forearm so that the Colt .25 could rest hidden behind the upper forearm until a spring near the elbow was activated, sending the .25 gliding down into my palm, and I had cut open a special Western shirt to accommodate the gun mechanism against my arm.
I had also figured out a way to strap an army combat knife to my calf with a slit cut in my jeans so that the knife could be pulled out easily. The problem was concealment. The guns bulged on me everywhere. I looked bulky and armored. It was only by wearing two Western shirts, a sweater, and a jacket that I was able to obscure the location of all my weapons but then I resembled some hunter bundled up against the arctic winter, and the weather was getting very warm outside.
The rest of that evening, I sat at the table dumb-dumbing forty-four bullets, scraping Xs across their heads. I had a big poster of Palantine’s head in the room and I would sight at him through the scope of the .38. At last all bundled up in my shirts and sweater, my jacket and guns, I fell out on the mattress with my eyes closed, the room still fluttered with light, into a half-sleep, like a big furry animal drifting into his own world.
Last thing I remember is writing in this diary: “Listen, you screwhead: Here is a man who wouldn’t take it anymore, a man who stood up against the cunts, the dogs, filth Here is . . . . . .
Incident in a Deli
About that time sometimes late at night I began to frequent this all-night deli in Spanish Harlem for snacks when the streets were relatively deserted.
Fellow named Melio ran the place to a blare of salsa, and he was the type of guy, you know, who liked to have company sometimes late at night, especially if you carried a piece.
Well this one particular night I had just gone over to the dairy counter to get a pint of chocolate milk and a Cuban sandwich on a hero roll when I hear a very nasty low voice talking to Melio and I turned toward the counter and saw a young black dude holding a gun on him, obviously strung out, a junkie.
“Come on, man, quick, quick, quick, let’s see that bread.” The dude is shaking his gun at Melio as he bounced up and down on the balls of his cheap worn black tennis shoes, and Melio he seemed frozen like an ice cream on a stick
The dude hadn’t noticed me yet, he was too jittery. This was probably his first real heist. He kept bouncing up and down on the balls of those cheap black tennis shoes and Melio he seemed frozen, as I say, like sludge. So much Chilly Willy.
The guy . . . the dude he said, “Come on, man. Quick, quick, quick let’s see the bread.” His gun’s shaking, his hand’s trembling. He hasn’t noticed me yet, off to one side, behind this stack of Quaker Corn Meal. Grits.
I said, “Hey, dude!”
Said, “Hey, dude!”
Surprised, he turned towards me just as I squeezed off a round of the .38 and there was this big explosion of blood on his lower jaw as he reeled and crashed to the floor and the gun smashed me back up against the grits, smashed me back hard against those grits as if I’ve been socked in the hand.
Well, I couldn’t feel anything else except the trembling in my hand as the grits came tumbling down, and then Melio he sort of came apart too and sort of leaned or fell across the counter and he had his own .38 in his hand . . . and as the dude rolled about on the floor and groaned, Melio he discharged two more bullets into his chest and then the guy lay still. He was one dead hunk of dark meat.
Melio was still feeling pretty hot I guess because then he turned the gun up toward me as if to get me, too, until he saw it was only me, Travis, and he lowered it again. Said, “Thanks man.”
Said, “Thanks, Travis, really. Figured I’d get him on the way out.”
Well, I didn’t want to have to argue with Melio about the ethics of the thing. I slipped the pistol back into my jacket pocket and I told him that he would have to cover for me on this one. Said, “I can’t stay for the cop show, Melio, my gun’s hot.”
“Well, you can’t do that, Travis,” Melio said. “You are my witness.”
“Hell, I can’t,” I told Melio. “It’s no sweat, Melio. What is this for you, four?”
Smiling, he held up three fingers: “Nah, three.”
Said, “All right, Travis, I do what I can. Thanks.”
I was feeling pretty frozen myself, said, “Thank you, Melio.”
When I turned to go I saw him pick up the phone to dial the police. He had his gun on the counter. I had my piece back in my jacket. The place smelled like a butcher shop. I went out the door with a pint of chocolate milk and a Cuban sandwich to my cab.
As the saying goes, when a man has taken blood, once a man has taken blood like that there is a definite dent in his life and it isn’t anymore the same as it was. Time has a different feeling. And it just blends one minute into the next. The film over life seems to slide back and forth on its sprockets so that one minute you are inside this horny dream, all wild and hot with blood, and the next it is like some sort of soap opera maybe between a boy and a girl and everything is in slow motion and there are just huge gaps between the words like feelings.
I stayed home more and more after the killing. My place became a cave to hide in. I cleaned and re-cleaned the .38. Watched TV. Ate out of jars.
I don’t know it was like nothing mattered to me anymore except to do what I had to do and that would take time and cunning. To be silent and careful and exact so that I might go down in history too.
Midafternoon Melodrama
It was boring a lotta the time but it didn’t seem that way to me then. I don’t know whether I knew what it was to be bored. There was this game I used to play when I watched TV. I’d be wearing all my guns, and I’d be watching the TV with my feet up on that crate, and as the people in the little box hassled each other, I would sort of take the heel of my boots and sort of rock that crate slowly back and forth to see how far it would tip over before falling.
It was all a question of balance, I guess, a teeter-tottering kind of thing. This beautiful young man would be talking to the beautiful young woman very earnestly about their “relationship” and how she had hurt him, maybe, and my heels would be on the melon crate rocking it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, every time just a little bit more, until one day the inevitable happened and the crate tipped backward and that TV went crashing to the floor and there was a short smelly flash and everything turned white like a cloud and the box was all jagged and broken glass. Dead knobs. That image had fled. “Damn,” I said to myself, “damn.” I said to myself, “Damn, damn.”
That image had fled. There wasn’t even anything to watch on TV anymore.
The Wizard Speaks
So one morning at 3:30 I’m sitting with Wizard, in this greasy spoon at a rear table over coffee and we can’t even talk. We’re like dead.
Charley T. enters, wearing his hang-dog look, and he wor
ks his way down through the other tables of the restaurant toward our table. Lately, as I say, I’d been keeping to myself, stayed away from all the other drivers, but that evening I went looking for Wizard. To talk, just to talk. Maybe to make one more stab at keeping in time with other people. So that I wouldn’t be completely inside this you know dream of going down in history, as I say, and then Charley T. had to come along. Almost spoiling things. As it were.
Wizard says, “How’s it, Charley?”
“Hey,” I say. I say, “Hey, Charley.” Almost as if I meant it, too.
Charley has an answer for me and Wizard too. He says, “Hi, Wiz. Hi ya killer.”
Says, “How ya doing, killer?”
He has his hand formed into a pistol which he cocks and fires pow with his lips.
Then Wizard says, “You’re getting quite a rep, Travis.”
Frankly, I felt like ice. Charley called to the cook for coffee and scrambled eggs, and then he sat down. He said, “Got the five bucks you owe me, killer?”
Well, when I reached into my jacket pocket for my roll, that old twenty-dollar bill I got that evening down on the Lower East Side it fell out too and I just stared at it a moment almost as if I was afraid to touch it. Then I found a five and gave it to Charley and scooped up that twenty and put it back into my jacket pocket.
Wizard was asking Charlie what the action was like.
“Slow,” Charlie says. “The night would have been shot, if I just didn’t grab a hot one—out-of-town line loader. Very straight. Played in slow and got twenty-five bills out of him.”
Wizard laughed, “I’m gonna turn you in to the Chamber of Commerce, you keep fleecing all the hicks like that.”
Charley T. he jived right back: “I knowed you to do worse.”
“Hell,” Wizard grinned, “at least I work the town. You just hang around the hotels, looking for line loaders in thousand-dollar suits . . .”
“It’s a living,” Charley chuckled.
“Well, I’m shoving on,” I said, getting up to leave.
“I’m with you,” Wizard said, getting up too.
We nodded goodbye to Charley and the cook and worked our way out toward the front door, but Charley wouldn’t leave it alone: “See ya, killer. Don’t forget your pea shooter.”
Out on the sidewalk Wizard makes a break straight for his cab, but I follow him. I just had to talk to somebody about something. He was standing there trying to open the door and he looked very old and sort of wise to me for a minute. A little old man. I said, “Hey Wiz?”
“Yeah.” He fell back against his cab leaning on it and we were facing each other dead on, while two black hookers worked the sidewalk across the street from us and the all-night neon sign of a live strip show flashed on and off and on and off, this box with hips blinking yellow and green in my eyes. I noticed some guy asleep in the doorway like a tiny little baby all curled up under an old jacket.
“Look, Wiz,” I said. “We never talk much, you and me . . .”
“Yeah?”
A group of street punks maybe fourteen years old rushed passed and jived at the hookers and they jived back at them.
“Yeah?” Wizard repeated like he knew something was up.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said, “on account you’ve been around so long.”
“Shoot.” Wizard was drumming with his fingertips against the fender of the cab but he seemed prepared to listen. Said, “They don’t call me Wizard for nothing.”
Said, “Shoot, Travis, I hear you talking to me.”
Well I just couldn’t get the words out straight, they just, you know, came out like a lot of words at first, all strung together without much sense to them and a lot of spaces in between like on one of those soap operas.
“Things got you down?” Wizard asked.
“Real down,” I said. I hung my head against my chest.
Wizard said, “It happens.”
I thought I could spill it all to Wizard maybe. Thought I really needed to. I really tried to let him know where I was at. Said, “Sometimes it gets so I just don’t know what I’m gonna do. I get some real crazy ideas, you know? Just to go out and do something?”
Wizard looked very sad just then and sorta leary of me too, but he tried to be nice. “Travis, I dig it,” he said. He shook his head at the sidewalk, said, “Look, you choose a certain way of life. You live it. It becomes what you are . . .”
Wizard said, “I’ve been a hacky twenty-seven years, last ten on the night shift. Still don’t own my own cab. I guess that’s just the way I liked it.”
He was nodding his head and shaking it and seemed to be very much lost in his own thoughts. He seemed to know me but there was something on his own mind, too. We’d have to have an exchange.
He said, “Look, a certain person does a certain kind of thing, that’s all there is to it. It becomes what you are. Why fight it? What do you know? How long you been a hack, a couple of months? You’re like a peg and you get dropped into a slot and you got to squirm and wiggle around awhile until you fit in.”
Well, I guess he just wasn’t hearing me. It was too late and he was too tired. I told him so. Said, “Wizard, that’s just about the dumbest thing I ever heard . . .”
“I got hemorrhoids,” he said, “and a polynoidal cyst, so what do you expect, Bertram Russel? With all those holes in my ass? Travis, I’ve been a cabbie all my life, what do I know?”
Wizard’s shaking his head no like a windshield wiper. He says, “Travis, I don’t even know what you’re talking to me about.”
“Neither do I, I guess.” Giving up on him. Well, I guess he thought he done me wrong . . . hurt my feelings somehow because he tried to reassure me. Said, “You’ll fit in. It’s lonely at first, rough. But you’ll fit in. You got no choice, Travis.”
Well I didn’t even try to respond to that. I said I was sorry to Wizard. Said, “Sorry, Wizard.” Well, I could feel a little twinge in my heart when he told me, “Don’t worry, killer, you’ll be all right.”
Wizard said, “I’ve seen enough to know.”
“Thanks.” He gave me a short wave and then got inside his cab and drove off, leaving me there with the pimps and the whores.
A New Face in the Crowd
I have no clear recollection of the days that followed this being with Wizard except that the weather was bright and clear and warm and I was all the time feeling like I had sinkers attached to my body all over. Huge metal weights.
Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, I know I drove everywhere in those days. I had gotten into the habit of tracking down every single Palantine rally. Making an appearance there. It just was important to me to be Johnny-on-the-Spot. To see the candidate in action. If I was to go down in history I had to make an appropriate plan.
Looking back I don’t know whether I got to certain places on my own or because I arranged to take a fare there. Can’t even recall any of the words Palantine said those days. I can remember the city, though feeling very much like in a cage. Doors everywhere. You squirm around to get what I needed, and I needed to see Betsy again. Needed to be on the scene with Palantine.
Once, on Avenue of the Americas, in the Fifties which is all new glass buildings, a rag of a man fluttered for a moment from a high window on the facade of this all glass tower like a big butterfly and then he seemed to fall heavily downward with a kind of loose sacklike speed.
I drove on, calmly watching him drop. There seemed no way of knowing the expression on the man’s face except to note those of the pedestrians on the busy street, the people in cars, people sitting in the plazas near fountains, or coming out of bars.
People seemed so hard and clear, as if they all had purposes to lose themselves in, all those determined city striders they seemed stamped against the building fronts like pressed tin.
The man high up momentarily waded in the air and moments later I thought I heard his screams as conversations of shoppers drifted back at me to the din of traffic horns from the various arcades
.
The woman in the back of my cab she said she thought “I saw something, did you see something, Driver? A man falling?”
“It was probably just newspaper,” I said, “blown up there by the wind. Just newspaper, ma’am, that sometimes happens, you know, on days like this.”
Well I was feeling pretty shakey, I guess, and that same afternoon in Queens there was this rally for Palantine in the parking lot of a supermarket. Everything all dressed in red, white, and blue bunting.
Maybe five hundred people milling about. Piped country music on loudspeakers. I had gotten so I could recognize the secret service men from their distinctive metallic gray suits, their sunglasses, and big linebacker physiques, and I knew how to position myself so as to stay always out of notice. Especially when I was carrying so much hardware.
I got there just as a whole bunch of local political types and some of the Palantine workers were being seated on the platform and I saw old Tom reading from a clipboard and there was Betsy and she was talking to another worker. Looked beautiful as ever. You better believe it.
Well, as I say, I was trying to be inconspicuous as hell but that Tom he looked up for a moment to his left and then back down into his clipboard and then he seemed to look my way again. Watching me sort of very closely and I didn’t dare to hide. After a moment, I saw him go over to Betsy and point my way, they started whispering together. I could just imagine what they were saying. I saw Betsy shaking her head, but she was staring at me, as if she didn’t see me almost, and I was all in a sweat in this bulky, bulged-out army jacket . . . fatigue jacket, with my new brush-cut hair standing up on end like a Mohawk.
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