Going to New York

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  Some of the craziest guys I met were actually the other drivers. One of them was a homeless crack addict. He drove an old black 2-door Chevy Camaro that he had bought a long time ago, during his better days. Now he slept in that car. And he drove it as a cab. When he picked people up, they had to move the front seat back to climb into the backseat, which was covered with his dirty laundry.

  One of the other drivers was a retired cop. Later I found out he didn't really retire. He was fired for stealing cocaine from the evidence storage. He told me that one of his regular taxi customers was an old man, who paid the retired cop to have sex with the old man's hot young wife in the cab, while the old man watched.

  Another driver, Will, was mentally ill. When he took his medications, he seemed to be high functioning. Or at least functioning well enough to drive people from point A to point B. But when he didn't take his meds, you could tell that there was something seriously wrong with him. He would stand in the middle of the room at the taxi home base, and bop back and forth, shifting his weight from his toes to his heels. And he was convinced his wife and daughter were being raped by aliens, and that the aliens had implanted tracking devices in their brains through their noses.

  One of the other drivers was friends with Will and went over to his house every now and then. One time, when he got there, Will opened the door and whispered: "Shhhh, they're here!"

  "Who's here?" the other driver asked him.

  "The aliens!" Will replied with a whisper.

  The other guy followed Will into the house. He looked around, but the living room was empty.

  "I don't see anyone."

  "Shhhh! They're invisible!"

  A few weeks later Will boarded up the windows and doors on the first floor and then jumped out of a second story window. That's when his wife decided enough was enough, and she called 911 to have him committed to the mental health ward at Bellvue Hospital.

  Will jumped out of the driving ambulance and ran away to Florida.

  About a month or so later, he suddenly showed up for work again, like nothing happened. Since Lou was always short on drivers, he didn't ask any questions and just told Will to go pick up some people and drive them to wherever they had to go.

  So these people were being driven around by an escaped mental patient. Literally. Food for thought for the next time you take a cab.

  Another driver was this young latino kid who was a gang member. He had robbed a mall with a machine gun. He was arrested and went to prison, but hid the money. When he finally got out of prison, he invested the money into opening up a flower store. But business wasn't going so well for him, so he ended up driving a cab to make ends meet.

  He was playing Tomb Raider at the time. I was playing it too, and I was farther along in the game than he was. There was this one spot he couldn't get past, so one day he said: "You're coming to my house tonight and you're gonna get me past that spot."

  I really didn't want to. I figured if I don't get him past that spot, he's gonna get pissed and stab me or something. And if I don't go, that's gonna piss him off, too, and then he's gonna stab me for that. So I went home with him after work at 2 am. He turned on his Playstation. I was sweating bullets, but I got him past that difficult spot in Tomb Raider without too much trouble. Then he said, "Thanks, you can go now."

  This other driver was a member of the mob. Or maybe he just pretended he was. He was this little old Italian guy who looked and sounded a lot like Joe Pesci. He had been in prison for check fraud for a couple of years. All the other old time drivers knew him, but I was the new kid. When he got out of prison and started working at the cab service again, he kept staring at me, while we were sitting in the base, waiting for calls. I kept looking back at him, wondering why he was staring at me. It was getting uncomfortable.

  Then he said: "Why are you looking at me?"

  "Uhmm, I'm not."

  "Why not? What? I'm not good enough for you or something? You think you're better than me?" He really did sound a lot like Joe Pesci.

  "Uhmm, no. Look, I don't want any trouble. I'm just trying to make some money."

  But he didn't let it go. He just kept making these confrontational comments. He really was trying to start shit with me for no damn reason. It was getting kinda scary. He was about a foot shorter than me. I'm sure I could have taken him in a fight if I had to. But who knows if this nutjob has a gun or something?

  Finally Jim, the dispatcher, told Joe Pesci to back off: "Leave Oliver alone. He's a good kid."

  Joe Pesci backed off immediately: "Aww, come on, I was only kidding." He gave me a big grin and slapped me on the back. Fucking douchebag. We ended up getting along pretty well though.We drivers were one big crazy family of misfits.

  Jim the dispatcher liked me a lot, because he thought it was cool that I was a cartoonist, and because I ran personal errands for him inbetween my calls. Jim weighed about 350 pounds and had no teeth. Well, no, that's not true. Actually he had one front tooth left that was holding on for dear life. Most of the errands involved returning a couple of pornos each night, that he had rented from the video store the previous night. He rented a LOT of porn.

  In return, he always tried to help me out by giving me the best calls of the night, even when it was really someone else's turn to get the next call. Airport calls were usually the best kind, because people who go to the airport tend to give big tips.

  Short one-way trips within our neighborhood were only $3.50 back then. Short round-trips were $7. Sometimes people had to make short round-trips to go buy drugs. Jim knew all the local crack houses, so if someone called for a round-trip to one of the known drug hotspots, he charged them $20 instead of $7, because of the risk involved.

  I didn't want to get arrested with drugs in my car for lousy $20, so I asked Jim to never send me on any of these drug runs. He promised he wouldn't.

  Then, during a particularly slow night, with hardly any calls at all, Jim sent me on a round-trip with this girl. She kept sniffling a lot while she was sitting in the car next to me. We drove to some really shitty part of town. She ran into some wretched house, came back out two minutes later, and handed me $20 when I dropped her off at her home. She was obviously a coke addict and we had just been on a drug run.

  When I got back to the base, I was mad at Jim and asked him why he sent me on that call, when I had specifically told him to never send me on a drug run. He said he felt bad that I wasn't making any money because it was such a slow night, so he figured he'd throw me a bone. He said he was just looking out for me. I told him I appreciated that he had the best intentions, but that I really really did not want to do these kinds of runs. After all, I was driving my own car, without a taxi license. So if the cops pulled me over with drugs in the car, I wouldn't be treated as a cab driver who had nothing to do with it, but as an accomplice in a crime.

  A few weeks later it was another very slow night. Jim sent me to pick up some guy who lived near the base. We drove to some shitty part of town, and he ran in, ran out, and handed me $20 when we got back. It was another drug run! Motherfucking Jim!

  When I got back to the base, I told Jim again that I didn't want these types of calls. He grinned his toothless grin and said: "Stop complaining. You just made some easy money, and nothing happened."

  I went on another call and when I was about to head back to the base, Jim called me on the radio and told me not to come back just yet. I asked him why not. He said because my previous passenger, the guy who had gone on a drug run, had lost his drugs in my car, and was freaking out.

  He was at the base, screaming that I had stolen his drugs. Jim tried to calm him down and told him that I didn't do any drugs and I didn't have his stuff, but the crazy guy kept screaming and freaking out.

  Finally he left and I went back to the base. I was sitting in the back room, where we drivers sat and waited for the next call. People who walked up to the dispatcher's booth window could not see into the back room.

  Suddenly the crazy drug guy cam
e back into the base and started screaming at Jim through the window of his booth. He yelled that he knew I was there, because he saw my car parked out front. Jim told him that I had gone home for the night, and that I left my car parked in front of the base because I lived right around the corner. The guy wouldn't stop. He was going nuts. He was really fiending for his fix.

  After screaming at Jim for about 10 minutes, he walked outside, to my car. He unzipped his pants, pulled out his dick, and peed all over the hood of my car. What the fuck?! I guess that was his revenge for me "stealing" his drugs.

  That night I had a few more calls after that little incident. Then I went home and parked the car. The next morning I was going to go to the grocery store. I got into my car, looked in the back, and there were the drugs, lying right there on my backseat, in plain sight! I couldn't believe that the passengers I picked up after the crazy drug guy didn't say anything or take it.

  So now I had a handful of white stuff wrapped in cellophane. I tried to figure out what to do with it. It looked like a lot. He had probably spent his whole paycheck on that stuff. I was so clueless about drugs, I didn't even know if that was cocaine, crack or heroin.

  What to do, what to dooo? I was thinking about trying some of it. Just to see what it's like. But I was scared, so I didn't. Then I thought about selling it. I sure could have used the money. You don't make a lot of money driving a cab. After you pay for the gas and the base fee to rent the two-way radio, and pay the base their share of the night's earnings, you basically walk away with nothing, if it wasn't for the tips.

  I had seen a news segment about racism. The news crew wanted to show that New York cab drivers were racist, because they would rather pick up a white person than a black one. The news crew had hired a black professor, and a white convict. The black professor tried to hail a cab, but virtually all of the yellow cabs passed him to pick up the white convict a few feet up the road.

  But now that I was a cab driver myself, I knew the truth: It had nothing to do with them being black or white. They could have been yellow and purple. The simple truth was that white people usually tipped the driver, and black people usually didn't. And if you depend on tips for your survival, of course you're going to try to pick up as many tippers as possible.

  Most of the other drivers drove twelve hours shifts, from 6 at night until 6 in the morning. And then they slept all day. But since I drew cartoons in the day time, and I had to get some sleep at some point, I only worked until 2 am. Those missing four hours made a big difference, because I still had to pay the same expensive rental fee for the two-way radio as everyone else. Some nights I came home with $20 or less. Things were so bad that I actually had to resort to eating dog food one day. That was probably the lowest point of my life.

  Donna's dad owned the house we lived in, and he gave us a break on the rent, because he knew we didn't have any money. But even the little bit of rent that we did have to pay was hard to come by. And then there were the bills. After everything was paid, there usually was almost no money left for food. And when I applied for my green card, Donna and I had to waive our rights to getting any kind of public assistance for the next few years. So we couldn't even apply for food stamps.

  I couldn't ask my parents for help, because they thought I was the black sheep of the family and I was nuts for moving to New York. I didn't even talk to my parents at all for the first two or three years after moving to the States. Donna was worried that if I talked to them, they would try to talk me out of being with her and convince me to move back to Germany, so she didn't want me to talk to them at all. And we didn't want to ask Donna's parents for any more help, because they were already helping us out by charging very little rent, and they thought I was some sort of nutjob for trying to make a living drawing silly little pictures.

  Donna and I usually didn't eat anything during the day, and when I got off work at 2 am, I stopped by a 24-hour grocery store on my way home. I picked up two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and that was all we ate. Occasionally Donna's mom gave her $20 to babysit her senile grandmother for a few hours. Those days were like Christmas, because we used that money to buy a family bucket of fried chicken and french fries. On those days we feasted like kings!

  Whenever I came home with almost no money after work, we tried to find quarters between the couch cushions or in the change jar her parents had in their apartment above ours. If we were lucky, we could find enough quarters to buy two cans of stew. We didn't want her parents to know how bad things really were, because we were ashamed and embarrassed. And we didn't want to hear them lecture us.

  One night there were no quarters left between the couch cushions or in the kitchen drawer. And Donna had already taken the last few quarters her parents had lying around upstairs a few days earlier. So we literally had no money. Zero. But we were starving. This situation would be unthinkable in Germany, because they have a much better social safety net over there. Nobody ever goes hungry.

  I looked through the kitchen cabinets to find anything edible. I didn't care if it was stale Doritos, or dried up old bread. I just needed something to eat. Anything. There was nothing. And then I found a few cans of dog food in the bottom cabinet. I grabbed one of the cans and stared at the picture on the label. I was so hungry, the picture of dog slop started to look a lot like beef stew. And the dog in the picture looked pretty happy with it. I figured, hey, meat is meat, so how much worse than Dinty Moore beef stew could this can of dog food possibly be? Turns out it can be a lot worse. A lot.

  When I told Donna I was going to eat the can of dog food, she started to laugh, because she thought I was kidding. Then, when I pulled a can opener out of the drawer, she laughed even harder because she knew I was serious. She just kept staring at me, from across the kitchen, hysterically laughing, while I opened the can and let the gooey slop slowly slide out of the can onto a plate. The chunks of meat really did look like stew. Kind of.

  I held each chunk under the faucet to wash off the gelatinous goo. Then I put a bunch of those chunks onto a cookie tray and put them in the oven, as if they were chicken nuggets. After I heated them up, I pulled out the tray and looked at my meal. It really didn't look all that bad. I put one of them in my mouth. The first thought that went through my head was: I made a terrible mistake.

  Apparently dog food meat is really just some ground up dead animal, bones and intestines and all. When you chew one of those chunks of pressed, processed meat, the ground up bones in it feel like sand between your teeth. It's disgusting. I couldn't even swallow that one chunk in my mouth and spit it out. We went to bed hungry that night. The next day, Donna went upstairs into her parents' apartment and ate a can of Ravioli while they weren't home. I was too proud to go upstairs and beg for food or steal cans out of their cabinets. She brought down a can of Ravioli for me. I was so hungry at that point, I didn't care about my pride or my principles anymore and ate the Ravioli.

  Anyway, let's get back to the bag of drugs I found on my backseat. I was thinking about selling it, because we could have really really used that money. But I was too scared, and I just ended up flushing it down the toilet. The thought of returning it to the guy who pissed all over my car never even occurred to me.

  One of the regular customers who called the taxi service I worked for had Tourette syndrome. I picked him up a few times. He was a nice, quiet guy. He was into martial arts and said he wanted to move to Hollywood and become a martial arts trainer for actors or a fight scene choreographer for action movies. I honestly didn't see that happening, because of his condition. He would quietly talk about something and suddenly FUCK! SHIT! FUCK! FUUUCK! he would blurt out all kinds of obscenities out of nowhere. And his arm would begin to twitch FUCK! COCKSUCKING FAGGOT! FUCK! and he'd hit the inside of the car door as hard as he could while shouting things that would even make a hooker blush.

  And then there was this guy who lived right around the corner from the base. I don't remember his name, but let's call him Tony. Tony suspected that his w
ife (or girlfriend?) was cheating on him. He stormed into the base and demanded to get a ride so he could look for her. It was a slow night, and Jim the dispatcher wanted to help me out, so he gave me the call even though it wasn't my turn.

  Tony told me to slowly drive up this block and down that block. We must have been driving around for about an hour. He didn't see his girl anywhere. So finally he told me to take him back home. When we got there, he was just going to get out of the car, without paying me or even tipping me. Yes, he was black.

  "Hey, wait a minute," I said. "You have to at least pay me the $7 for a round-trip."

  "For what? I didn't go anywhere. You dropped me off right where you picked me up. I never even got out of the car."

  "Are you kidding me? I just drove you around for like an hour, dude!"

  He didn't give a shit. He was just gonna get out of the car without paying and go inside his house. I was sooo pissed. How could this asshole do this to me?