Auntie

It’s 12:30am on a Wendesday night and there isn’t much going on out there. I’m grateful for the radio call in Humboldt Park. I stop by the California Avenue address and wait. A few minutes later a drawn woman of indeterminate age opens the door tentatively, slips outside, then takes her time locking up.

She might be fifty, she might be forty but she’s got very few teeth left and a piercing where a mole might be on her cheek.

“47th and Harlem, you know where that’s at? she asks.

“Sure,” I answer.

“That’s where I’m going. Never been there before. I’m going to meet my nephew at a strip-club, can you believe that? Him dragging me out of the house at this hour?”

“Do you have an address for this place?”

“No. Let me call him and get it for you.”

I turn the taxi towards the Eisenhower as her cell-phone rings and rings. I hear her counting coins back there and this makes me wonder whether I’ll be getting paid with laundry quarters for this trek. She finally gets someone on the line as we’re exiting at Harlem. She tells them to go get her nephew, “Papi, tell him it’s his auntie calling.”

She keeps reassuring me that I’ll get paid, that if she doesn’t have enough her nephew would take care of it. I say I’m not worried. She keeps counting and re-counting her coins. She tells me she has three children ranging in age from twenty-two to seventeen.

“My oldest he dropped out of college after one semester and I still gotta pay for that. I didn’t know about it but you could get a—what do you call it? A mother loan or something. It’s cool to have kids...until you get the bill.”

At 47th Street there’s a gas station on one side and a forest preserve on the other. I ask her to call the nephew again. She passes the phone to me and over crowd noise he keeps repeating and repeating, “My partner, he’s got two $50s. What you wanna do?” until the line suddenly cuts out. There was something about passing the forest preserve in the pauses around the talk of $50 dollar bills so I take a chance and go west on 47th. After emerging from the woods we pass a vacant-looking garage. In its lot a sedan sits idling, the tail-pipe smoking, all the windows fogged up. My passenger is now panicking.

“He knows what I’m like. I have anxiety attacks, I never even taken a cab before. I’m bi-polar. WHERE IS HE?”

We cross Joliet Road and see a neon sign ahead.“All Stars.” The lot is full of trucks and beat-up older model vehicles. She pays me the $27 fare in paper bills—not laundry quarters—and runs out, into the arms of a pudgy man with a thin mustache, who’s just come out of the building.

Maintenance Man

He gets in at the bus stop at Chicago and Western. “Can’t wait for that bus no more. Gotta get to work,” he says, giving a Lincoln Park address, smelling strongly of beer.

He tells me it’s only his second day back on the job. He was in an accident that shattered his hand.

“It was at Cortland and Ashland. You know that corner?” he asks.

“Yeah, it’s a nightmare,” I say.

“You know how the lanes split up and there are columns in between? This guy makes a turn right after and smashes right into me. I had a ‘96 Saturn. It was totaled. He was driving an SUV with Florida plates so maybe that’s why he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to turn there. It’s one of the first intersections with a red-light camera in the city. Did you know that?”

Just as he’s saying this we pass Fullerton and Ashland and see the telltale flash as a camera catches a car for crossing on the red. He claps his hands and cheers.

“Anyways, his insurance was good and covered everything but after awhile you go sorta crazy not doing anything in your house, y’know? I’ve never missed more than a couple days of work and I’ve been working there fifteen years. They give me all these painkillers—Vicodin—but they don’t help me at all. I’d rather let Mother Nature heal me. I guess I could sell those pills but I’d get in trouble—heh-heh-heh—I’m just kidding, I wouldn’t do that. Beer’s good enough for me. You know Warsteiner? Good German beer...I’m just glad to be back workin’.”

“What do you do?”

“I work maintenance at this high-rise you’re taking me to. It’s right next to that new one they’re building. I work midnights, 11:30pm to 8:00am. I just got back so I’m not as fast as I used to be. I gotta wax and buff forty-two floors every night. I work by myself.”

He tells me he’s lived in the neighborhood where I picked him up all his life, “I live on Rice, you know they cut of the end of the block—made it into a cul-de-sac—but it used to go through and there was a drug house on that corner. They cleaned it up. Me and my sister own it, otherwise there’s no way I could live there. I don’t have a million bucks, heh-heh-heh...”

We pull into the circle drive of his building but he tells me to stop short of the glass doors because he has to go in through the back. He pays, saying to keep the two dollars change, and walks away.

Chest Hams

She practically gets herself run over getting me to stop. Then she drags a guy away from a group talking on the sidewalk and hurries him into the cab. We’re in Printer’s Row and they want to go to Lakeview so I make my way toward Lake Shore Drive.

Every time I turn she pinballs from one side of the cab to the other—hitting the door, then caroming back into her companion, then back at the door again.

“I tend to be dramatic, if you haven’t noticed,” she announces.

She wants to know where I’m from and when I tell her she asks if I have a good recipe for borsht. “We’re both cooks,” she explains. I don’t. They gossip about work for a bit. It seems he’s just started there.

“I have to confess something: I feel really bad about what happened last week. I was like, ‘Hey, new guy, how about an over-the-jeans handjob?’ Then I practically did it with you in the middle of the restaurant. So unprofessional!”

“It’s alright. I was just a little taken aback,” he answers.

“I’m a very forward person. In fact I have a blog where I write about my love life and all sorts of things.”

“Is it popular?”

“Well, not a lot of people follow it publicly but I get thousands of hits a month, so I know people are reading it. One thing, fellas, when you’re playing with my chest hams, realize that they’re attached to the rest of my body. Some of these guys try to turn the poor things 180° like a dial.

“My father once emailed to ask what ‘cunny’ meant—it’s what I call my pussy—and when I explained it he was like, ‘Why didn’t you just say you were talking about your twat??’ Me and him are two peas in a pod...”

“Chest hams? I’ve never heard them called that,” he says. I hadn’t ever heard that one either.

“Like that?” she asks him. He doesn’t respond.

When we arrive at the corner she indicated he makes a show of digging through his pockets and comes up empty. He tells her he was planning to take the CTA from work.

“Don’t worry about it. Money’s not a concern. I’m a trust-fund baby,” she chirps while paying the fare. They get out of the cab and linger on the curb, waiting for someone to make the next move.

Wrecked

At 1:20 am last Saturday morning Frank Caruso sat warming himself in the back seat of a police cruiser when a 2010 Chevy Impala plowed into him and took his life. Caruso’s car had broken down in the left lane of the eastbound Eisenhower in the suburb of Addison. He’d called his girlfriend to come pick him up but a state trooper had stopped and let him warm himself in the back seat while waiting for the tow truck to come. Daniel Clark, the driver of the Impala, was drunk when he rear-ended the cruiser.

While this was going on I was driving my cab in the city. Most of my passengers at 1:00 am on a Saturday morning are drunk and on their way to another bar. Some of the more sensible ones are headed home. But, by the fact that they’re in the back of my cab, they’re all smarter and better people than Daniel Clark, who got hammered then got behind the wheel. As I made my rounds the radio would occasionally report an update on the cop car crash on the Eisenhower. The road was closed for hours. I bet a lot of suburban motorists felt put out by having to detour or, worse, wait, while their way home, strewn with automotive debris was being cleared by the crime scene investigators and later by the road crew. Frank Caruso’s family wouldn’t have the luxury of feeling put out.

I see wrecks all over the city’s thoroughfares every weekend. Cars wrapped around light poles, balanced precariously atop concrete medians with motor oil flowing from the undercarriage, engulfed in flames in the express lanes on the highway, sitting forgotten, perpendicular to the roadway with their front ends compressed, accordion-like, all waiting to be hauled away to the scrap yard to be salvaged for parts if any are to be salvaged. I’ve been fortunate enough to always be the one squeezing past in the bottleneck rather than having my statement taken by a trooper by the roadside or in an ambulance en route to the hospital or the morgue. Sometime over this same weekend I passed a vehicle on Lake Shore Drive with all four tires worn to nothing, motor exposed, the crunched-up hood some ten feet away. A little further down, in one of the inlets that cops use to pull over speeders, two men stood clasping, one comforting the other. They were silhouetted by the street lamps, Lincoln Park stretching out beyond them. Some nights the city’s streets feel like an obstacle course daring us not to become one of these two men.

There’s been a rash of wrong-way driving incidents of late. I don’t know all the particulars of these latest cases nor do I really want to, but it’s a fair bet that drinking or some other intoxicant played some part in these drivers’ decision to disregard the safety and well-being of others. When this kind of thing happens in River North, which is rife with one-way streets, it can be kind of funny; typically it’s an out-of-towner and his course is quickly corrected by a chorus of car horns. No harm done aside from a bit of embarrassment. A car traveling against traffic on the Kennedy or Lake Shore Drive, however, isn’t funny in the least. If there’s one over-arching insight I’ve gained from my eleven years of cab-driving it’s that it’s much too easy to get a license to operate a vehicle in this country. Under the best of circumstances many drivers are oblivious to much of what goes on around them. I see near-accidents dozens of times each and every night and I doubt that those concerned have any clue how close they come to causing calamity. Add alcohol, pills, powders, and cell phones to their already marginal motoring skills and you get the many horrorshows we end up watching on the evening news. We take our cars and the right to use them so much for granted at this point that we forget that we’re basically steering bombs on wheels out there. Point one of these bombs at a stream of others the way these wrong-way drivers do and it’s a miracle when fatalities are limited.

Daniel Clark didn’t even need to be pointed the wrong way. Imagine the state you’d have to be in to see a state cruiser up ahead of you on the highway with it’s lights going, likely visible from miles away, and you’re so obliterated that you don’t change lanes but plow right into it? How was he ever allowed to even take his car keys out of his pocket? Many of my passengers spend their entire cab ride bragging to their buddies about how much they drank, how much they’re gonna drink, or how much they drank on some other, more memorable night. It doesn’t paint them in in the most flattering light but at least their doing their boasting in the back seat. I wonder who Daniel Clark bragged to before starting up his Impala Saturday night?

At about 5:00 am the following Sunday morning I was on the Dan Ryan heading home after a typically-busy Saturday night. I was in the express lanes when out of the corner of my eye I saw two cars reversing at a good clip back up the right merging lane, likely trying to make it back to the locals. It was one of those sights that makes you think you’re not seeing straight but I knew I wasn’t that tired. Who in their right mind would settle on this as a way to correct their course? When did missing one’s exit become an excuse to lose your mind? I don’t know if those two caused any harm that night. Like Frank Caruso I was just trying to make it home.

 There are many reasons that people have for wanting to destroy themselves but doing so in a motor vehicle rarely limits the destruction to oneself. Drink yourself cross-eyed, just don’t get behind the wheel. Please. Some of us are just trying to make it home.

"You know it’s bad when you’re dreaming of your own bed."

 Early in the evening two couples—two men and two women—ask to go to the Girl and the Goat. They spend the whole ride from Ukrainian Village to the West Loop talking about sleeping habits. One of the guys tells about the heating pad they have that goes under the sheets. He says the mattress is ice-cold on winter nights despite the rest of the bedroom being balmy. One of the women goes on at length about night-sweats that leave her tee shirts soaked. Her girlfriend confirms this. The men suggest a solution:

"You should get Botox all over your body to block all your sweat glands!"

 ***

A bit later five Hispanic girls—dressed as if on the way to the prom—squeeze in. Their boyfriends give them the address of the club and tell me to go, waiting in the street for the next taxi to happen by. There’s a lot of laughter, the kind only a group of girls on a night out can make. One starts telling the others about her boyfriend, Aldo, being stuck talking to her father all night,

“So you know how my fathers kind-of racist, how he’s always making those awful jokes? He kept talking about how he only goes to Hooters for the food and Aldo had to play along, the poor guy. He just kept nodding, you know? Agreeing, right?

“Then my dad starts talking about how he likes to slice guatemalans and Aldo doesn’t know what to say, but that’s how my dad pronounces ‘watermelons,’ you know?”

The other girls are howling. One of them says,

“I know exactly what you mean. My dad says ‘marshmallow’ when what he means is ‘mushroom’ !”

***

All night tour buses, limos, and other vehicles in town from the ‘burbs for a Saturday night pay homage to Marilyn Monroe. The awful statue in Pioneer Court looks more like a female-impersonator than the blonde bombshell but that doesn’t stop the parade of pilgrims from lining up to have their picture taken posing between her legs. There was a promise that she’d be gone come spring and it can’t come soon enough. That thing makes me embarrassed to live here.

***

At a 7-Eleven in Lincoln Park a man dressed in a winter jumpsuit with shorts over the top of it is completely entranced by the rack of energy bars. He’s frozen there like a mime. His rapt gaze is about to burn holes through the tinfoil wrappers but when I pass close to him to get to the coffee machine he hurriedly moves over to the newspaper rack. He’s still trying to hypnotize it as I walk back out to the cab.

***

Back in Ukrainian Village two couples get in. The guy in the front seat looks at some passersby as we pull away and mutters, “Weird-beards. Fuckin’ hipsters...” then proceeds to discuss facial hair and favorite undiscovered dining spots with his friends for the rest of the ride to Lincoln Park. They even ask where I eat but are disappointed when I don’t answer, wondering instead why that could possibly matter. They get out at Clark and Wrightwood and go to the Wiener’s Circle.

***

The man that takes their place apologizes in advance for the short ride. He says he’s from New York and that cabbies there often refuse short fares. I tell him that short fares are the best if you can string a bunch together. People tend to tip better and you waste less time deadheading back from some remote corner of the city. To illustrate my point a weaving man attempts to open the cab’s door and get in before my passenger has even had a chance to reach for his wallet in front of his Surf Street address. The new guy wants to go back to within a block of the Weiner’s Circle. He’s either really drunk or really tired or a healthy combination of the two.

“Tired, man. It’s been one of those nights. Girl trouble. You know it’s bad when you’re dreaming of your own bed.”

I get distracted thinking about his words and almost miss the turn to his street.

“I’m not so fucked up that my internal compass is busted,” he chides me after correcting our course.

After that I call it a night as well.

Braggart

The well-dressed man hailed me at State and Grand on Saturday night.

“Can you take me to 1520 North Damen? Take the Kennedy and get off at Division not North, I don’t want to get stuck dealing with that...How are you doing?”

“Alright. And you?”

“Couldn’t be better. I’m wonderful. I’m back in town for a few days and on my way to surprise a few friends. They have no idea I’m here. They’re going to be thrilled...What kind of vehicle is this?”

“A Scion.”

“Is it the xB or the xD?

“xB, I think.”

“I couldn’t imagine driving a car without a stick-shift. I’m an expert driver and I like to feel that I’m guiding the machine rather that it guiding me.”

“Well, you might feel differently if you had to do the kind of driving I do. Try driving eighty hours a week in stop-and-go city traffic and you’ll want to make it as easy on yourself as you can. I don’t associate driving with pleasure. It’s work.”

“I love speed. Last year I made it from LA to San Antonio in ten hours. TEN HOURS! That’s around thirteen hundred miles. I was in New Mexico for all of forty-seven minutes. That’s like a hundred miles. I saw the sun come up somewhere in Texas and I was lucky it had been a cool night or the car would’ve overheated. I was really pushing it.”

I didn’t respond or comment on his claims. The fact that the man had to boast of his prowess behind the wheel to a complete stranger baffled me a bit. Perhaps the fact that I was a cabdriver made him think his feats would impress me or that we could commiserate over shared interests. Neither was the case but my silence didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

“I could never get a crotch-rocket. Can you imagine? Going 200-250mph? I’d break every law.”

Trying to get him off the subject of speed I asked why he’d moved away.

“I had to move to Dallas because of a family situation about seven months ago. It’s alright, I mean my apartment costs $550 and it’s right in the middle of town, you couldn’t do that here, no way. I’m bartending. Making $7-10K a month. You can’t beat that. But it’s just slinging drinks, it’s not the kind of bartending I like to do. I prefer to make quality cocktails.”

As we neared the 1500 block of Damen he pointed out the yellowish light over the hidden door of the Violet Hour and said that that was where he was headed to meet his friends, reiterating how thrilled they were going to be to see him. I had no doubt that they would be. He worried over his bills, settling on amount that included a tip that was midway between acceptable and insulting, bid me goodnight, and strode across the street.

Tramp Stamp

It’s a frigid Tuesday night and Western Avenue’s a ghost town except for a woman in a fake fur and leggings desperately waving both arms my way from the bus stop at Augusta. I stop. There’s not much to lose on a night like this.

“You don’t know how happy I am to see you,” she says, “this is crazy-man weather. This is the type of night that if I was homeless, people would have to get sacrificed. I’d be all Jeffrey Dahmer out here to survive.

“Alright. I’m going to the 2500 block of Monroe. My brother’s there and he’s got my tax return for me. He got some Jew accountant who got us way more than we deserve...Believe me, I wouldn’t be out here if there wasn’t money to be made...

“Don’t worry now, I’ve got money. You’ll get paid.”

I tell her I’m not worried. It’s a short trip so even if she runs it won’t be much of a loss. She gets on the phone and says that she’ll be there in four minutes. She chatters to me about how the area’s in the process of getting gentrified, how most of the projects are gone now. I assume that this is to ease my fears about going there but she seems much more nervous about the whole thing than I do. She counts and recounts the crumpled bills in her hands.

The 2500 block of Monroe is mostly empty lots with a couple of forlorn-looking four-flats here and there to keep it from reverting to the prairie which was once here. We stop in front of one of these. A kid in a puffy jacket stamps his feet and hops to and fro to keep from freezing in place. This must be her tax guy. I turn off the meter and ask for $5.95 but she says to wait, that she’ll be going back in a minute. She runs across the street and, after exchanging a few words with the guy, jumps into the driver’s seat of a car parked out front while he gets in on the passenger’s side. She’s out seconds later and running back toward the taxi. She opens the door, then squats down with her back to me and asks me not to look while she urinates, “Good thing I got a tissue,” she mutters before plopping back inside and giving an address on Cortez, a couple blocks from where I picked her up. As we pull away the kid across the street looks like he’s about to piss himself laughing. “This is the time of night and place to get killed in Chicago,” she says.

She gets on the phone again and says to have $10 ready for her when she gets there for the cab. It sounds like whoever she’s talking to needs a bit of convincing. She hangs up with a deep sigh and complains, “My husband. He’s such a Jew. He’s telling me to make sure and get a receipt for the ride. Jesus.” We stop and I see a basement apartment light go on. She hands me $4, then runs out and reaches through the chain-link fence and grabs a $10 bill from the window and returns with it. The fare is $11.95 and she asks for a dollar back, thanks me and runs back to the house only to turn right back around. She’s forgotten her receipt. Gotta keep careful records where taxes are concerned.

                                                                     ****

Back on Western, a couple immediately flags me from the Empty Bottle. “Where do you live?” he asks her. She gives her address in Lakeview and so we go north. They chitchat like any two people who’d just met might. Somehow the subject of tattoos comes up and he proudly tells her that he’s got four. One of which is a tramp stamp.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

 “Well, you know, it’s where a tramp stamp would be. It’s my, like, statement of feminism, you know?” he explains.

          “Huh. What is it?”

“It’s kind of like a symbol. Like an ankh cross. It’s part of my philosophy...See, I’ve got a whole philosophy based on, like, this thing I wrote once. It’s about providence. Where things are just gonna, like, happen to you, you know?”

It’s hard to say whether she understands or not, though I know I’m pretty damned confused. We pass the Viaduct Theater and there are band vans being loaded up after a gig.

“That’s what I love about it here. There’s like all these places that are holes-in-the-wall where there’s all this music. One day when I don’t have to, like, go to work, I’ll go out to see bands every night of the week. Theater too. I love theater. I go to Steppenwolf like all the time.”

“I totally get that. I like theater too. Back in California I had a subscription to the local theater so I went a lot. It’s good that way because you already paid so you kind of have to go, right?” she answers.

As we pass Schuba’s he points at it and says, “That’s where I saw Sufjan Stevens, who’s like a legend in my world. After the show we were hanging out and I think he, like, hit on me. I like his music and all but not, like, THAT much, you know?”

We stop at her place, a couple blocks away from Wrigley Field. He tells her he’ll take the ‘el’ back home, pays for the cab, and says, “Thanks, Boss,” before following her inside. I take a last look over and she looks back just then, holding my gaze for an instant as if asking for advice with her eyes, then she turns around and she’s gone.