Death of yet another dog

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote about the taxi business, saying.. “The taxi business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”

Okay, so he actually said it about the music business, but I’ve found that it applies to the taxi business as well.

Today I lost my lease, because I was behind on my $575.00 per week payment and the money just wasn’t coming in. I suppose I could have done what I saw other drivers do.. the ones who came out at about noon and worked through the bar closings at 2 in the morning, then napped for a few hours in their cabs before hitting the road again at about 5 in the morning to get runs going to the airport. I guess they went home after that, to sleep a little more and then get back out at noon again. I’m not sure I have it in me to miss out on life to that degree (call me lazy).

The thieves and pimps in the opening paragraph are, of course, the managers and owners of the taxi companies, while the good men who die like dogs would be the drivers who put in the insanely long hours so that the owners can be assured of a wealthy, opulent life style. I wasn’t at it long, but I saw drivers on the verge of dropping from pure exhaustion, who’d bicker with each other for a space in a taxi line or a five dollar fare.

My first post in this terribly skimpy blog introduced Ace and Tiny, who are two of the most generous and wonderful individuals I’ve ever met. They each put in hours equivalent to a full-time job, since they’ve built up enough personal business over the years to get by without killing themselves, so they don’t need to sleep in their cars and grab morning airport runs. I want to publicly thank them for sharing so much of that personal business with me, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough. Honorable mention also goes to Kurt and Vern, who are two other drivers with years of experience under their belts.. they shared calls with me also, and taught me a few tricks of the trade. Thanks gentlemen, I wish you well.

There are a few other companies in town where I suppose I could lease another cab, since I have a county permit that’s good for another 8 months, but I’d shortly be back in the same position since they all charge $575.00 per week. My wife isn’t working and I’ve simply run out of confidence, so we’re leaving in a few days to stay with some friends in a distant town, where I’ll look for a regular job. We have to get out of this motel shortly, since I no longer have a daily income, but I’m not in the least bit miserable over that.. this place is dreadful.

The blog shall stay but no more posts after this.. I know it wasn’t much but I gave it a good try. If for some crazy reason I decide to lease a cab again, I won’t be blogging because now I’ve learned my lesson, which is that there’s no life to be had outside of the taxi. There’s no room for silly things like socializing and blogging, since one must get that lease paid so that the company owner can make a yacht payment.

Thanks for riding, even though it was a short trip. If you need me, you'll find me HERE.

cash+booze=instant asshole

Okay, rich people.. and semi-rich people.. and people who THINK you’re rich when you’ve had too much to drink (mostly just the latter).. I’m here to let you know something very, very important that is going to HELP you in social situations with lower life forms such as us taxi drivers..

Nobody gives a flying fuck how much money you have and are willing to spend to get what you want.

To the guy who was outside of Tumbleweed the other night at closing time.. you know who you are.. you offered me a hundred bucks to take you to the Hilton “RIGHT NOW”, which would have necessitated my kicking out the guy who’d already gotten into the cab and wanted to go to Long Beach. He was a nice fella who’d also had too much to drink, just like YOU, but he knew how to conduct himself. You, on the other hand, started swearing at me like a pompous, spoiled little idiot after I pulled away, and you continued swearing and stamping your spoiled little feet as you pointed your skinny, high-falutin’ rich little finger at me and reigned down curses on my taxi, even after I assured you that another taxi would be coming along in a minute or so. The guy going to Long Beach was willing to share with you at first, but you insisted on stealing it out from under him, so he said “let’s go” and I had to cut you loose, to stand there and scream like a rich little girl, with everyone looking at you and thinking exactly what my passenger and I were thinking.. “what a douche”. By the way, when I dropped off the first guy in Long Beach the meter was at about fifty bucks but he gave me a hundred. I had to drive a lot farther to earn it but it was worth it to leave you there.

To the other guy who was outside of the same bar a few nights earlier.. you know who you are.. you had a buddy with you who seemed to be a pretty cool dude.. YOU, on the other hand, insisted on smoking in my taxi even after I’d asked you not to.. so you had to go and ask me, “how much to smoke in your taxi?” and I had to explain to you that there is no smoking in my taxi because I used to smoke years ago but gave it up and don’t want to start again, plus I don’t want holes burned into my seats, which are the two main reasons I don’t allow smoking at all, and you said, “there’s a price on everything asshole, so what’s your price to let me smoke in your taxi?” but calling me “asshole” kind of sealed the deal on you, so I left you and your buddy standing in front of the bar door and as I pulled away I saw your buddy calling YOU an asshole, because it was a Tuesday morning at 2:15 am and taxis were scarce. By the way, if you’d given me a moment instead of calling me silly, obscene little names, I would have let you light it up before getting in and have your cig on the sidewalk while I waited for you without the meter running.. that’s just how cool I am.. if you stop long enough to find out.

To you people who often throw an elaborate amount of money my way to “get there quick” or “wait here”, you’re okay as long as you’re being nice and you’re not under the impression that cash is tantamount to an asshole license. Paying me off in large amounts of green doesn’t turn me into a bug on your windshield, despite what some of you seem to think. I’m still going to hold to my rules, such as no smoking, no mess making and no sex in the back seat, and if you want to stamp your feet and cry, I’ll be happy to let you do that on the sidewalk as I pull away and go get one of the 99.9% of passengers who understand the concept of reciprocal courtesy. I'm still going to make money, so I don't need yours if you're demanding my principles in return.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

A writer friend emailed me concerning the previous post and said that I should aim for “less explanation and more funny”. On the same day I found out that Ace had told one of our regular passengers, “six words you’ll never hear from Dave are, ”to make a long story short”. Renowned French philosopher Voltaire even said, “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything”. I think they’re all on the right track, even though Voltaire put it best, which is why he is a famous dead philosopher while Ace is just a taxi driver and my friend is only barely famous and not in the least bit dead (yet).

I’ve often been accused of over-telling a story, anecdote or account to the point where the listener loses interest and decides to shoot his or herself in the head. It’s a trait that isn’t easily shaken, because I always have a LOT to say, but I’m getting better at finding brevity and casting off the unimportant details so as not to bog down a perfectly entertaining narrative in a quagmire of confusing triviality.

I was born overly talkative. The nurses in the delivery room were charmed by me at first, as most young women are, but then they started giving each other “the glance” that says “okay, THIS guy is a little annoying”, before they started making excuses about having to be somewhere else. As they shed their surgical masks and gowns, they slowly drifted out, leaving me to chat away at the poor, beleaguered Doctor, who ended up snipping the cord himself before dashing off to “perform an emergency appendectomy”.. yeah, like I haven’t heard THAT ONE before.

My inclination to chatter incessantly has proven to be a detriment as a taxi driver too. Passengers who are bombarded with verbal assault, even if it’s happy, funny verbal assault, tend to want to get out of the taxi sooner than they normally would, like at stoplights and stuff. When they don’t let me take them all the way to the front door of where they’re going, but opt instead to leap from the cab as we’re zooming down the highway at 60 miles per hour, I suspect that I may have overdone it once again.

I’m trying to get better at this, and in an effort to remove my best foot from my mouth and put it forward, I’ll end this post here. You are now free to move on.

A long, boring explanation on how it works

It’s Saturday, and in a few scant hours I’ll be cruising the Huntington Beach area with the other guys on “the crew” - the aforementioned cast of characters who provide transportation services to those downtrodden individuals of society who suffer from sobriety impairment and/or driver’s license deficiency.

I didn’t ask to be initiated into this gang, nor did I sit down for an interview or fill out an application – I simply leased a taxi from the taxi company and while I was sitting in front of Max’s Sports Pub on Beach Boulevard one evening waiting for a call, ACE, who is the official "godfather of transportation for hire" much in the same way that James Brown was the "godfather of soul", pulled up alongside me in his spiffy black Town Car and asked what I was doing.

“Sitting in front of Max’s, waiting for a call”, said I.

We talked for awhile, mostly about taxi driving, and I told him of the few years experience I had gleaned by driving a taxi in Oregon, which pales significantly to his 30+ years of driving in Huntington Beach, but I must have said something right because he asked me if I’d be open to taking a few “personal calls”, meaning that he’d ring me up on my cell phone and hand off anything that he was too busy to take care of himself. I readily agreed, but I initially (and mistakenly) thought that I’d be picking up a few calls here and there between dispatch calls given by the taxi company – boy, was I in for an awakening.

When one leases a taxi from a taxi company, (depending on what the lease agreement states) one can go out and provide taxi services to people in a number of different areas and by different means. With our company, we can cover any area in Orange County except for the city of Anaheim (aka "Disney Resort") and John Wayne Airport (yes, we have an airport named after a movie cowboy, because if anything comes to mind when talking about the beaches of southern California, it's cowboys). Drivers need special permits for these places because otherwise every driver in Orange county would work at either of them and none would work elsewhere. A driver can take calls given to him/her by the taxi company through the dispatch service, wait in a taxi line with other taxis at a hotel or shopping mall, pull over to pick up people who “flag” a taxi, or take personal calls from people who know him/her and call directly. The latter method is how Ace and the crew operate, and on weekends the calls come in fast and furious.

I had a few “personals” while driving for the cab company in Oregon, but this was more than several years ago, before all drivers had cell phones, and the dispatcher detested taking personal calls for drivers – he’d rather have assigned a driver to a call, because (I guess) he felt like a personal secretary if he had to stoop so low as to simply pass out messages to drivers over the 2-way radio. It was in a driver’s best interest to refrain from pissing off the dispatcher at that time, and since personal calls pissed off the dispatcher, I didn’t make it a practice.

It’s a different story here in Orange County, given that I don’t even know who our dispatcher is. It’s a much larger operation and 2-way radios are a thing of the past. Each car is equipped with a computer terminal and each driver is required by county regulations to have a cell phone. When calls come from dispatch, they arrive as “instant messages” on the computer terminal and either get accepted or rejected by the driver, using the appropriate keys – not a word is exchanged between the dispatch service and the driver. On top of that, a driver needs to “post” on the computer terminal when he wants to take calls from the company dispatch, but according to the lease agreement, the dispatch is provided only as a service and the driver needn’t use it at all, so posting is optional. If a driver never posts he can still take his taxi out and run calls by some other method and there are no hard feelings. Ace claims not to have posted on the computer for 2 years. Tiny, in his white stretch limo, doesn’t even have a computer. Both of them make a living from the personal calls they have built up over the years. The handful of other drivers in the group, such as myself, post on the computer and take dispatch calls during the slower hours, but on weekend evenings it’s generally unnecessary.

I should explain that Tiny was a taxi driver for many years, but he isn’t anymore – he’s a limo driver. It’s a different licensing system for him, but it’s perfectly legal. He simply hires out his limo for a trip much in the same that you’d rent a limo for an evening. You’d pay something like $400.00 to the limo company to get a vehicle and driver for a 6 hour stint on a Saturday evening, and you’d pay about ten bucks to get in Tiny’s limo and have him take you from Surf City Saloon on Beach to downtown. There’s no meter, you’re just renting a limo for about 15 minutes. The only limitation he has is that he can’t take flags or walk ups, the person wanting to hire him must call and request him. The rest of us have meters and lease from one of the slew of taxi companies in Orange County. Ace and I, along with several other drivers, are with the same company whereas Kurt leases from a competitor and only on weekends.

We don’t generally run the meters for regular personals though – trips between certain areas of Huntington Beach and to outlying areas such as John Wayne Airport, Disney Resort and Los Angeles are “flat rated”, meaning that the driver quotes a certain fare before starting out and the passenger agrees to it. It’s a good idea to run the meter on a first time passenger, but the regular locals balk at it. On a run that’s made often, the passenger just hands me a 5, 10 or 20 dollar bill before jumping out and the fare hasn’t even been mentioned during the trip – it’s just what they always pay and will continue to pay as long as that particular trip is made.

I should point out on this very public BLOG that it’s illegal in Orange County, California for a taxi driver to charge over what the meter would read out for any given trip, so if a regular pays over that amount the balance is always considered to be a gratuity. The regulars know this, but I’m always careful to run the meter on a first timer so that they know they aren’t being overcharged. If Joe always goes from point A to point B in the city and always pays a ten-dollar bill but that trip meters out to seven bucks on average, Joe is always tipping three bucks, which he knows. There’s no jacking up the meter by “taking the long way” or inflating flat rates with this group – passengers are commonly referred to as customers and treated accordingly, with fairness and good service.

There’s no competition between us either, because we look out for each other and pass calls off to each other in a manner to ensure that everyone makes a living and that the customers are taken care of without having to wait too long. If I get a personal call while I’m on a rather long jaunt, I’ll call another driver in the group to see if he can handle it so that my customer won’t have to wait very long. I admit that I’m not crazy about the idea of some gorgeous blonde sliding her sweet rear end into Ace’s Town Car where she’ll get the feel of real leather along with the XM tunes (I drive a company lease car, which is a standard yellow taxi with vinyl seats and FM radio), because she’ll certainly call HIM from now on rather than me, but he’ll probably have several of his own personals stacked up already and hand her back off to me anyway.

That’s the idea of the whole thing, and I think that’s the ideology that Ace must have picked up on when he first spoke with me in front of Max’s. It’s a rare ideology among taxi drivers, but it’s one that works and ensures repeat business again and again and again..

It’s the Zen of taxi driving.

violence in the sewing room

One of my faithful readers from my previous blog, when invited to comment via email about the design of this current blog, has stated..

I love the yellow frame and the photo---I find yellow on black text hard reading though. If I just was going to look, not read, it would be very cabbie-evocative, but I do want to read you, and hope that you find some other way to carry out the theme that doesn't make me want to poke out my eye with a knitting needle.

Not being one to encourage self-inflicted knitting wounds, I'll get on a design update as soon as possible. Please put DOWN the knitting needle and BACK AWAY SLOWLY..

Fear and Loathing in Huntington Beach

Call a particular phone number in Huntington Beach, California in the evening to request a taxi and you just might get a limousine instead. It’s an older model that’s seen better days, just like it’s driver, but both have a certain class and charisma that the locals find charming. The driver is a great teddy bear of a man who goes by the absurdly inaccurate moniker of “Tiny” – who, with his long, white beard accentuating his shiny bald head and jolly frame, is endlessly compared to a southern California beach version of Santa Claus, including a mirthful laugh and mischievous grin. The ladies adore this ebullient elf, often taking to his lap when arriving at their destination so as to place a big kiss on his cheek; a gift to thank him for a safe and enjoyable ride home from the bar, club or house party where he had initially picked them up.

Call that same number and you may not get Tiny and his limo at all – you just might get “Ace” instead, who will arrive in an elegant black Town Car complete with XM Satellite Radio so that he can dial up the music of your choice as you glide along to your destination in fashionable comfort. No need to give this ZZ TOP look-alike any directions, he’s only been driving a taxi in Huntington Beach for about 30 years, so he knows the way downtown if you’re “just looking for some tush”. It’s possible that he hasn’t shaved in that long either, judging by the bushy beard, which facilitates the personae that the baseball cap, ponytail and Levi jacket have started.

If your mood leans a bit to the wilder side, you can pray to the gods of rock and roll that “Kruzin Kurt” will show up with one of the few taxis where smoking is allowed and solemnity is banned. Kurt will crank up Zeppelin when they blare from the radio, but not so that you can’t hear him excitedly impart his account of the previous passenger, who either stiffed him on the fare, doubled the tip, tossed their cookies in his cab or decided to ride topless, depending on whether or not it’s a full moon that particular evening. Under a wicked lion’s mane of white hair, Kurt is our very own “Reverend Jim”, who seems as though he might have once lived in Haight-Ashbury (I don’t think he ever did, he just seems like he did). Straight arrows and corporate types might want to wait for the bus.

There are a handful of other drivers, all of them characters straight out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel, and I’m the newest of them – my name is Dave. You can either call me that or one of the nicks that the boys have given me, “DJ DAVE” or “WRONG WAY DAVE”, the latter of which I earned by going south when the destination lay to the north, and vice versa. I told you I was new at this, and they knew it too, but STILL decided to saddle me with this dreadful name that I halfheartedly agreed to let ACE print on the calling cards that he made up for me to hand out to customers.. at least for now. The "DJ DAVE" nick seemed the obvious first choice after I had informed them about my stellar career as a disc jockey in radio, which didn’t work out very well as evidenced by the fact that I now drive a yellow Crown Victoria with a roof light on top, in which I give people rides in exchange for money. My radio days are long behind me (I was actually replaced by automation.. grrr.. ) and so are my days as an actor, mime, audio producer and film/TV extra. I’ve had a few various careers in my time, but I must honestly say that driving a taxi, especially in Huntington Beach, is one of the most entertaining and challenging endeavors that I’ve ever tackled.

One thing that I like to do besides drive, is write. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not I'm any good at it, but I’ve liked writing for many years and I find it to be relaxing and therapeutic. Despite the fact that taxi driving can be so darned entertaining at times, it can be stressful too, with long hours and difficult customers, so I hope that keeping a BLOG about my adventures will be a welcome outlet to blow off steam while amusing my readers and possibly even inviting a lawsuit or two.

So, welcome to OC CABBIE. Fasten your seatbelts and ignore the meter, it will only distract you from the scenery as we head south.. er, uh.. I mean NORTH.

PS.. Yes, I DID actually make a living as a MIME for a few years.. please don't poke fun, I'm very sensitive about that.